ENTERPRISE MASTER DATA ARCHITECTURE: DESIGN DECISIONS AND OPTIONS (Research-in-Progress) Boris Otto Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen boris.otto@unisg.ch Alexander Schmidt Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen alexander.schmidt@unisg.ch Abstract: The enterprise-wide management of master data is a prerequisite for companies to meet strategic business requirements such as compliance to regulatory requirements, integrated customer management, and global business process integration. Among others, this demands systematic design of the enterprise master data architecture. The current state-of-the-art, however, does not provide sufficient guidance for practitioners as it does not specify concrete design decisions they have to make and to the design options of which they can choose with regard to the master data architecture. This paper aims at contributing to this gap. It reports on the findings of three case studies and uses morphological analysis to structure design decisions and options for the management of an enterprise master data architecture. Key Words: Enterprise Master Data Architecture, Master Data Management, Design Decisions, Case Study Research INTRODUCTION Motivation The management of master data on an enterprise-wide level has received increasing attention in the practitioners’ community, lately [6, p. 2, 33, p. 63]. One of the reasons for this is the important role master data plays in many companies in meeting strategic business requirements, as the following examples show:  Companies from the process industry have to meet the provisions of REACH, which is an EU guideline regulating registration, evaluation, authorization, and restriction of chemical substances. Companies affected by REACH need to gather data and give evidence of the properties of their chemical substances across the entire supply chain [8].  With fierce competition in a highly saturated market, insurance companies need to be able to view their customers from a 360° perspective, i.e. all customer master data, contract data, and performance data must be available in a consistent, up-to-date, and complete form across the company [24, p. 330]. This requirement is enforced by regulations and promulgated under the Insurance Mediation Directive as well as the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) [12].  In order to be able to conduct a comprehensive spend analysis in multi-divisional companies, the central procurement department has to have access to consistent supplier master data and product