The truth is that achieving a single view across the enterprise, is key to running your business. The effective management and governance of master data is both an opportunity and challenge for many large enterprises. Gartner Master Data Management (MDM) Summit 2008 highlights key trends and identifies best practices, technologies, software tools and vendors that will guide you through successful implementation of your MDM initiatives. These may be customer data integration (CDI) projects, product information management (PIM) projects and multi domain MDM projects.

Unlike past development efforts, MDM poses unique challenges and requires new relationships between business and IT in areas such as workflow, governance, stewardship and data integration. To be successful, organizations must understand the role of information governance and the impact MDM has on their applications portfolio and information infrastructure.

Organizations use MDM to accelerate enterprise agility, promote operational efficiency, achieve competitive differentiation, support enterprise transparency, make SOA work more effectively, and ensure corporate compliance. Knowing where to start -- understanding the business case -- planning the effort -- and selecting the right tools and platform - will help you avoid common pitfalls.

The second Gartner Master Data Management summit builds on the inaugural 2007 event with new content in two main directions 1) helping organizations build a holistic, business driven MDM program, and 2) going deeper into the technology foundation that is needed to make MDM work for you. We shall also be introducing the first Gartner MDM Excellence Awards - a competition to showcase success and best practice in MDM programs. This event is unique in its breadth and depth of business and IT related MDM coverage and is the only event where you get the advice of experienced, independent and objective Gartner research analysts. This is The MDM event of 2008.