The legacy of Microsoft Organizations

Let’s start with the first attempts and how this whole concept of MDM was created and introduced in the company.

When I joined Microsoft, one of the foundational solutions in global IT architecture was a system called MSO, which stands for Microsoft Organizations. In a way, it was an attempt to create an organizational master, and the reason for this was very specific – it came down to the necessity of connecting a CRM system, which was running on Siebel in those days, with the in-house-built revenue collection system. We had to make an explicit link between a customer in the CRM with the respective revenue landing in our revenue collection system.

It was not efficient to simply make a direct link between the systems. We tried it, and it didn’t work well. It created even more frustration due to the high volatility of data. Here, the idea was to have something serving as a proxy, almost like a keyring, but with data mastering...