Companies cook the books at their own peril. That's the principal lesson we've learned from Enron and other corporate scandals these past few years. Even when thievery's not the issue, the messier your official system of records is, the more likely you are to incur the wrath of regulators, litigators and the financial community in general.

Compliance is the art of making sure that your organization's data-management practices pass muster with authorities and stakeholders. Where compliance is concerned, data quality, integrity and security are everything. If you can't produce operational data of sufficient completeness, validity, accuracy and granularity, you won't be able to prove you've complied with the next regulatory mandate. And your corporate brass might not be able to prove their innocence.

Master data management (MDM) is the key to corporate compliance. MDM refers to the infrastructure, tools and best practices for governance of official corporate records that may be scattered across diverse databases and other repositories. MDM helps you assure that data has been generated, vetted, processed, protected and transmitted according to a consistent set of policies and controls.

MDM has become the grand unification field for all data-management technologies. Increasingly, enterprise IT groups are laying out MDM strategies that encompass relational databases, data warehouses and profiling; quality tools, including data mapping and transformation engines; business intelligence, enterprise information integration (EII), extract transform load as well as metadata management, reporting and auditing. Vendors are scrambling to reposition their data-management products under this new umbrella.

Expect to see ongoing consolidation in the MDM market as vendors assemble more comprehensive product suites and aim to strengthen their compliance-value proposition. Dominant data-management vendors will continue to beef up their data quality and metadata management offerings.

For example, IBM fields one of the strongest MDM suites on the market. It has made several data-management acquisition in recent years - most notably, EII pioneer Ascential - to build up its MDM portfolio. Recently, IBM acquired Unicorn Solutions, a leading provider of enterprise tools that manage metadata. Such management is critical to compliance, which requires organizations to understand where data originates, how that data maps to other data, and how, when and by whom it was modified.