Introducing Federated Master Data Governance

Federated Master Data Governance is an alternative to managing master data centrally in an organization's system landscape. It allows the distribution of data ownership to several MDG instances, each owning a subset of the master data. This includes the option to activate SAP Master Data Governance on operative SAP S/4HANA systems to use them as Application Data Owner (ADO).

The next figure provides an overview of Federated Master Data Governance.

A federated approach balances centralized and decentralized master data processes based on a clear data ownership model. This ensures that data is created and managed exactly where it is best understood. Accordingly, a federated governance approach comprises of a core data owner (system) that is responsible for the enterprise-wide relevant master data attributes (core data), and a decentralized application data owner (systems), each of which is responsible for individual application-specific segments of the master data (application data).

Let's see the different deployment options in the next figure.

The next video compares the various SAP Master Data Governance deployment approaches for managing Business Partner data.

Using the Business Partner as an example, one MDG instance is responsible for the core data (for example, name, address, tax numbers, identification numbers), and several other MDG instances can have ownership of the application-specific data (for example, master data that controls sales and financial business processes). Customers can define the ownership according to their specific landscape. In Federated Master Data Governance, in addition to coordinated distribution of data in the landscape, processes are also conducted in a coordinated fashion and can be tracked across system boundaries. Data can be maintained in all MDG instances and master data clients. This data must be replicated to a core data owner (for example, Master Data Governance on SAP S/4HANA) that evaluates which data has been maintained, and that determines the relevant data owners. These data owners are informed about the changes, upon which they revise and verify their data and send the results back to the core data owner. Once the core data owner has received a response from all the other data owners, it replicates the data to all connected MDG instances and master data clients in the landscape.