I had an interesting comment from an industry insider which referred back to earlier posts on Investment Product Master and Information Firewall – the question was “in an earlier post you raised the concept of the information firewall within an asset management firm, while more recently you raised a discussion on product master – where do the two intersect, or are they the same“
In essence both are one and the same concept – when I was discussing information firewalls in the context of the marketing and client reporting departments within investment management companies I was describing a top level strategy that should be applied to ensure consistent, accurate and timely product data is communicated externally – a product master on the other hand is a concrete technology / process that is used to deliver on many of the strategic goals as laid out in my post on the information firewall.
While the deployment of an “information firewall” / “product master” alone should not in itself be seen as the defacto solution to solving client facing data quality problems, it is a key element of what is needed to setup a successful investment product data quality management process – remember technology is not a panacea to all data quality ills!
Posted by Ronan Brennan 
