The following are five business drivers that support MDM initiatives and where iWay MDS can serve a leading role:

• Improved regulatory compliance ability or reduce regulatory risk.
• Increased marketing effectiveness (up-sell and cross-sell) through integrated customer information.
• Increased customer satisfaction and service.
• Improved real-time business-decision making capabilities through better information quality.
• Reduced costs associated with data quality.

An approach to MDM must incorporate an understanding of your corporate data, the business lines, and communication among those business lines. MDM is not a technology project, it is not a big bang large project approach, but a combination of technology and human interaction.

The idea that data is credible provides value to business strategies the more you share and communicate the information across business lines.

Some of the key functions of MDM and Data Quality are listed and described in the following table.

Function	Description
Profiling	Analysis of data to provide insight into the quality of the data and help to identify data quality issues.
Parsing and Standardization	Decomposition of fields into component parts and formatting of values into consistent layouts based on industry standards, local standards, user-defined business rules and knowledge bases of values and patterns.
Generalized Cleansing	Modification of data values to meet domain restrictions, integrity constraints or other business rules that define sufficient data quality for the organization.
Enrichment	Add context or complete the data. Geographical data, increase the data information for entities.
Match	Identify, link related entries within or across sets of data.
Merge	Merge related entries to create a centralized golden record.
Monitoring	Deployment of controls to ensure ongoing conformance of data to business rules that define data quality for the organization.