Master Data Management("MDM") is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and Information Technology ("IT") work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise's official shared master data assets.

As a result of business unit and product line segmentation, the same business entity (such as Customer, Supplier, Product) will be serviced by different product lines; redundant data will be entered about the business entity in order to process the transaction. The redundancy of business entity data is compounded in the front- to back-office life cycle, where the authoritative single source for the party, account and product data is needed but is often once again redundantly entered or augmented.

A typical example is the scenario of a bank at which a customer has taken out a mortgage and the bank begins to send mortgage solicitations to that customer, ignoring the fact that the person already has a mortgage account relationship with the bank. This happens because the customer information used by the marketing section within the bank lacks integration with the customer information used by the customer services section of the bank. Thus the two groups remain unaware that an existing customer is also considered a sales lead. The process of record linkage is used to associate different records that correspond to the same entity, in this case the same person.