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Return on Investment 83

this modeling is not reusable at the time of the modeling of
transactional data then a financial loss is recorded (that of
the restarting from the beginning of transactional data).

Moreover, if distortions between the reference/master
data and the transactional data appear, then discrepancies
between business objects risk rendering the alignment of the
MDM with the business rules management system
unnecessarily complex. Indeed, the rules must exploit the
same business object, whether they be reference/master or
transactional data.

For example, a rule that manipulates reference/master
and transactional data of a “product” business object at the
same time must get all this data from the same business
object. There would be no sense in having a “product”
business object as master data, and one or more others for
transactional data. This would leave the door open for
inconsistencies in the management of data.

4.5. Summary of the return on investment of MDM

Having arrived at the end of this chapter, what do we
have at hand to justify, from a financial point of view, an
investment in MDM? Unfortunately, it is impossible to
provide figures outside of the context of a real company.
However, we do have the criteria for financial analysis, and
they are shown in Table 4.1, following the order in which we
have described them in this chapter.