Microsoft’s MDM Roadmap
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Just saw Microsoft’s MDM Roadmap (updated on 07/08/08 to fix the link) on a blog entry by someone named Sandeep Kalyanimath.
It was interesting reading. Seems Microsoft didn’t bury the Stratature technology after all, but is using it as the foundation for its entry into the MDM market. The new product based on Stratature is codenamed “Bulldog”, and will aim at meeting these requirements:
- leverage existing technology investments
- integrates with customers’ software assets
- is easy to install and maintain
- provides a low total cost of ownership
Well, that’s a pretty tall order! A “technology preview” version will be released in Feb. 2008, with general availability planned to coincide with the next release of Office.
Please let us know what you think of Microsoft’s MDM Roadmap by commenting on this post.
Metadata and Master Data Management
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Metadata management is often overlooked, misunderstood or assumed to be taken care of automatically as part of an MDM initiative. While it’s true that databases can generate metadata reports based on a logical data model, there’s a lot more than that to metadata management in an MDM initiative.
As companies start to include multiple domains such as customers, products, suppliers, etc. in their MDM initiatives, the collaborative lifecycle management of the master data across business and IT functions will become a challenging change management undertaking.
One of the key benefits to addressing metadata management is to lower cost of ownership by documenting the entire end-to-end process for master data at the metadata level that greatly enhances change control across business and IT functions.
“Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource. Metadata is often called ‘data about data’ or ‘information about information’” (National Information Standards Organization, 2004).
Metadata within an MDM initiative includes all of the following: the source systems, MDM hub, data quality tools, business process management (BPM) and workflow tools, and enterprise application integration (EAI) tools.
The need for metadata for different semantics between the source systems and the MDM hub is the most apparent, as a source and hub may call the same thing by different names, e.g. part number versus SKU.
However the business rules, transformations and data rules in the data quality, BPM and EAI tools are often overlooked. Yet the complete data lineage from source to hub and back to source needs to be fully documented at the metadata layer.
So if managing metadata is so important, how does one go about managing it?
There are three approaches to managing metadata: a centralized approach, a distributed approach or a federated (hybrid) approach.
The centralized approach stores all metadata centrally, providing easy access to information, scalability and performance. This approach is more complex to integrate initially than the distributed approach, requires continuous synchronization and is also a single point of failure.
The distributed approach takes advantage of each participating system’s own metadata management capabilities and simply reads the information as required. In essence, this is simply a web portal that queries the relevant information from all participating systems on demand.
The federated approach is similar to the distributed approach in maintaining references to the metadata information for all participating systems. But also like the centralized approach, it can store metadata information locally, thus taking advantage of the best of the centralized and distributed approaches.
Choosing the best approach for an organization depends on a number of factors. The metadata capabilities of some of the existing systems in use by an organization may prohibit the federated or distributed approach, so a thorough assessment of your current tools is a necessary consideration.
Also if you are planning on upgrading existing tools, make sure that the selections fit into your metadata management approach.
MDM initiatives will require significant attention to be paid to semantics across the enterprise and metadata management in order to be successful.
Maureen Butler Joins Team; Brings Extensive SAP Expertise
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I’m very pleased to announce that Maureen Butler is joining us as a Senior Consultant. She brings significant SAP information management, marketing, supply chain, organizational design and change management expertise to the team.
Prior to joining the firm, she was Director, Customer Information Management for a Fortune 500 company, W.W. Grainger, Inc., where she led a team of 35 people in cleansing & migrating customer data into an enterprise-wide SAP system. She also developed the Data Governance and Quality programs, and implemented Grainger’s Center of Excellence for Customer Information.
By launching a cross-functional Master Data Management initiative at W.W. Grainger to improve data quality and usability, she helped drive significant revenue growth, cost savings, and process improvements for customer acquisition and penetration.
Ms. Butler has more than seventeen years of strategic leadership experience in integrated market planning and communications, customer brand strategy, organizational design, change management, product management, and supply chain with companies such as W.W. Grainger, Inc., National Education Training Group, and Educational Resources.
She is a Six Sigma Champion and a graduate of Grainger’s Leadership Development Program. She received an MBA from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, and a business marketing degree from Loyola University Chicago. Ms. Butler is located in Palatine, Illinois.
In line with our article yesterday on our MDM partnership strategy, Maureen will help us to establish and grow our partnership with SAP.
Our MDM Partnership Strategy
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At Hub Solution Designs, our MDM partnership strategy is pretty straightforward.
We are a management & technology consulting firm focused exclusively on Master Data Management and Data Governance. Our strategy is to partner with all of the leading MDM vendors, because there is no “one-size fits all” solution and businesses need options here. So our strategy is to provide unbiased solutions that best meet the needs of our clients.
Partnering with all of the MDM vendors is an ambitious strategy, but as Teddy Roosevelt said, “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing”.
And pragmatically speaking, as trusted advisors who bring a tested methodology and sound best practices to bear on every MDM engagement, we think the question of which consulting firm or systems integrator you select is, if anything, more important than which MDM hub platform you select.
So here’s where we stand today with the three MDM “mega-vendors” (Oracle, IBM and SAP) and the three smaller MDM vendors (Siperian, Initiate Systems and Purisma/D&B).
Oracle: We joined the Oracle Partner Network as a worldwide partner in November 2007. Several of our team members have extensive experience with Oracle’s growing portfolio of MDM solutions, and have driven successful implementations of them at financial services institutions, software companies, and high tech firms. We have good relationships with Oracle’s MDM product strategy team and with Oracle sales teams around the country. We’re also involved in the independent Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and, as part of its Education Committee, helped plan the MDM track of OAUG’s upcoming COLLABORATE 08 conference.
IBM: We joined IBM’s PartnerWorld program in September 2007, based on knowing several people from DWL (acquired by IBM in 2005) and other parts of IBM. We think that IBM is going to do very well with companies in their “sweet spot” (certain industries like financial services and companies that are historically heavy users of IBM hardware or software). So we’ll keep looking for opportunities to grow our client relationships, our team and our expertise in the area of IBM’s MDM solutions.
SAP: another slow starter, with an MDM solution that was originally very centered around the “Product” domain. But SAP’s NetWeaver MDM solution continues to evolve and develop. And SAP also has a strong “sweet spot” of companies (global manufacturers, consumer packaged goods companies and European-headquartered firms), and a large installed base of SAP applications users who are pretty loyal when it comes to considering an MDM solution from SAP. We’re just about to join the SAP partner program at the Associate Partner level to start, and have just brought on a new team member with significant experience in Master Data Management and SAP.
We also continue to be impressed by the smaller MDM software vendors. We think we’re still in the early stages of MDM market development and there’s still room for a “best of breed” MDM strategy at this point.
The Siperian MDM Hub is a robust product, and is able to identify and manage relationships among multiple types of enterprise data, such as customers, products or accounts, across multiple applications and lines of business. The company has done very well in the financial services and pharmaceutical & life sciences industries. Siperian had a more than 300% growth rate from 2006 to 2007, and just received a $25 million round of financing in January, to support additional expansion in Europe and further development of its channels and products. The Siperian customers we’ve talked to really like the product, and the Siperian people we work with are top notch. We’ve been an approved Siperian partner since October 2007, and are planning to attend the Siperian user group and partner summit in San Francisco in early April.
Initiate Systems filed with the SEC to go public in November 2007. The company was founded in 1995 and has more than 140 customers in production, in industries such as health care, financial services, public sector, retail and technology, with marquee customers such as Microsoft, Intuit, Capital One, Countrywide, Wells Fargo, Humana, Hyatt Hotels, Barnes & Noble, CVS, and SuperValu. We signed a partnership agreement with Initiate in December 2007, after talking with some Initiate people and customers at the Fall 2007 MDM Summit conference in New York. The company’s technology has some very interesting capabilities, and we’re impressed with what we’ve seen to date of the product, the company and its people.
Purisma (a D&B company): Prior to starting Hub Solution Designs in mid-2007, I worked for Dun & Bradstreet for three years in its Global Alliance team, managing D&B’s strategic alliance with Oracle. I was part of various CDI and MDM related teams and initiatives within D&B, and was one of the few people from D&B to attend the first public CDI-MDM Summit conference in Spring 2006. After being an internal MDM evangelist at D&B for several years, I was pleased to see the company acquire Purisma in November 2007. The acquisition was a good strategic fit for both companies, allowing D&B to become more of a player in the Customer Data Integration (CDI) and MDM marketplace, and giving Purisma the chance to extend its market reach. We’re not formal partners with D&B/Purisma yet, but we’re working on it, and in the meantime, our network of informal relationships within both companies continues to grow.
After establishing and growing our relationships with all of these companies, we’re listening carefully to what our clients and the market as a whole are telling us about their relative strengths & weaknesses, who has the best product for which situation in which industries, and who’s growing their market share over time. We think there will be some additional consolidation in MDM, as in every other part of the enterprise software market, and we hope to continue as thought leaders by being able to look “around the corner” at what’s coming two to five years down the road.
We’ve got our eye on other large enterprise software players, like Microsoft, salesforce.com and Google, that are not yet really playing in the MDM space in an organized way.
Our formal & informal relationships with Oracle, IBM, SAP, Siperian, Initiate Systems and Purisma/D&B will continue to develop and grow. Our clients benefit from our solid methodology, approaches and best practices, plus the processes, procedures and data governance that we help you wrap around these MDM products, regardless of which vendor you select. Please review our service offerings for Educational Workshops, Readiness Assessment, Software Selection, and Business Case Creation to get an idea of how we help clients map out and execute a winning MDM strategy.
The vendors bring great technology and we bring great people with broad domain expertise.
MDM Software Evaluation & Selection
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Another one-pager today on our MDM Software Evaluation & Selection service offering.
Please let us know if you have any feedback for us on it.
Also, we’ll be announcing a new team member later on today, and we’re very excited about her joining us!
MDM Business Case Creation & ROI Analysis
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We published another one-page document today on our Business Case Creation & ROI Analysis service offering. Please let us know what you think …
MDM Educational Workshops and MDM Readiness Assessment
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Today, we published two one-page documents on our Educational Workshops and Readiness Assessment service offerings on our web site.
Please let us know what you think of them …
A Key Difference in Data Quality for MDM
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Most data quality initiatives consist of processes, procedures and technology, with the goal of achieving a desired level of quality in corporate data.
While companies sometimes did data quality projects prior to the emergence of MDM, I cannot stress enough how important it is to take a fresh look at data quality when embarking on an MDM initiative.
Companies all too often focus exclusively on the MDM hub and either hope that the MDM hub will fix their data quality problems or have not yet recognized the fact that there is a fundamental difference in data quality requirements between MDM and previous information management approaches.
We consider data to be of a high quality if it is accurate (correctness) , complete (no missing data), valid (format and rules), available (as needed) and stored securely.
The need for high quality data quality was first fueled by projects such as CRM, ERP and data warehousing beginning more than a decade ago. However, what resulted from many of those projects are silos of corporate data, along with a silo approach to data quality.
For example, a data warehousing project cleaned up the data being stored into the data warehouse through the ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) processes, with further cleansing after the data was loaded, leaving the source systems untouched. Other examples include solutions for compliance and business intelligence with the capability to query data from numerous sources and once again treat data quality at the target only, not at the sources.
In contrast, an MDM initiative requires data quality to be addressed at both the source systems and the hub, which is a key difference between previous approaches and MDM.
Major source systems (and there can be as many as 30-50 at large companies) typically collect and maintain their data locally and do not share the data. An MDM hub, whether implemented in the transactional, registry or hybrid style, becomes the system of record for enterprise data and facilitates the sharing of that data throughout the enterprise as needed.
Therefore for MDM to operate properly in sharing and synchronizing data between sources and the hub, it is critical that the data remain consistent between the source and the hub and hence that data quality needs to be addressed at the source.
It’s simply not enough to cleanse the data only at the hub if the source system does not recognize the data when it reads it back from the hub.
So where does one begin? What we recommend is that prior to implementing an MDM hub, begin with data profiling of all source systems involved.
Profile the data that will feed the hub, analyze the results and carefully catalog the metadata for the key data elements. Once the characteristics and quality of the data is understood, the next step is to create business rules to correct data quality issues at each source.
There are many data quality products on the market and choosing one will have to be the subject of another blog.
Upcoming Speaking Engagements and Magazine Articles
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It never rains but it pours. It looks like we’re going to be doing two speaking engagements in March & April – at the Spring 2008 MDM Summit in San Francisco, CA, and the Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE 08 conference in Denver, CO.
The MDM Summit conference has grown to be one of the largest gatherings of data integration professionals, with 600+ visionaries and vendors in one location. The session, which will be presented jointly by myself and our client, Shirlee Collins from ADP Dealer Services, is entitled “Real World Data Governance”, and will be presented on Monday, March 31st from 3:05-4:05 pm PDT. We’ll talk about establishing a data governance organization, improving underlying customer data quality, and creating a robust process to enrich customer data in Oracle Customer Hub with D&B information. The ADP Dealer Services story reflects a pragmatic approach, weaving together Sales Operations and Finance, and balancing each group’s needs and priorities in managing customer master data.
I’m also speaking at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver, CO, which is the annual conference of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), and which will have a Master Data Management track for the first time. I’m a member of the OAUG Education Committee, and helped to plan & organize the MDM track of the upcoming conference. The session, “Best Practices in Master Data Management and Data Governance”, will be presented on Tuesday, April 15th from 9:45-10:45 am MDT. It will present some useful MDM and Data Governance best practices, and will also cover what works and what doesn’t, the importance of a holistic approach, how to get the political aspects right, and how to address more than just the technology elements.
DM Review magazine is publishing an article I wrote on “The Political Aspects of Master Data Management and Data Governance” in its upcoming March issue. I was published back in February 2007 in a DM Review Special Report. The new article suggests several ways to deal with the difficult political aspects of MDM projects to make those initiatives more successful.
Our VP & Partner, Tim O’Sullivan, also wrote an article that will be published as the key feature of an upcoming MDM supplement in the June issue of DM Review. The article on “Project Management Challenges within a Changing Landscape” explores project management best practices for MDM initiatives, and provides a framework for addressing MDM’s typical political, technological and data stewardship challenges.
Is There Such a Thing as a “Quick MDM Strategy”?
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Well, the short answer is – “it depends”! Putting aside the conventional answer for the moment, I’d say that a critical first step in achieving a pragmatic MDM strategy is that your company must agree and commit to developing a 3-5 year MDM strategy.
This is not as simple as it may sound. Successfully executing an MDM strategy with a 3-5 year vision requires a considerable cross-functional effort and substantial agreement on some vexing political, business and technology issues. More on this later.
The following situation is not uncommon. A senior executive at the company decrees that the company needs an MDM solution to remain competitive or to fix nagging data issues. The vendor selection team jumps into action, solicits requirements from business owners, puts together a vendor questionnaire and contacts vendors.
The next few months are taken up with defining selection criteria, sitting through vendor demonstrations and digesting different vendors’ current approach to MDM and their future roadmaps.
The promise of a business intelligence solution, with a Single View of Customers, across CRM and ERP systems, through a federated or persistent hub is now only months away.
The demos were impressive and installation is promised to take only 8-12 weeks. After all, the company has already implemented CRM and ERP solutions, so the next solution should be much quicker – right?
Which brings us back to “it depends” The reality is that this approach may work for certain companies. Those companies who have matured through CRM and ERP implementations, who have well defined business needs and change management projects under their belts, with well documented business processes and a Project Management Office already in place stand the best chance to succeed.
But then these are the very companies who already know that they need to develop an MDM strategy, often with the help of consultants.
And this leads us to the question of developing an MDM strategy. How comprehensive does the strategy need to be? How much time is reasonable to spend developing a strategy? Can a staged approach be taken on the strategy, for example just start with customers and worry about other domains once that is working? Can we just bring a hub up with our current customer data and go from there? These are all valid questions.
One of the biggest factors that will help answer these questions is an organizational readiness assessment.
The strategy process should develop a vision for data governance, business outcomes, business processes and technology for the company. The process will touch on situation analysis, goals and objectives, strategy development, implementation plans and change management. Involving consultants through the process can greatly speed the process for many companies.
Our recommendation is that no matter how tempting a “quick win” approach to implementing MDM may seem – make sure you take some time up front to develop your strategy with both short and long term goals. Make sure that strategy is accepted throughout the organization and that the short term goals are on the correct path to solving the longer term business objectives.
This can help you avoid having to “rip & replace” your MDM solution shortly after building it, and help prevent you from creating MDM “data silos” because your strategy didn’t take into account other critical enterprise data domains beyond the immediate situation.
MDM can be a “game changing” initiative, giving the enterprise clean, consolidated, complete data for the first time, driving increased revenue, decreased costs and improved compliance. But as Stephen Covey says, make sure you “begin with the end in mind”.
New Hub Solution Designs Web Site Launched
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We’ve just launched a completely redesigned web site for Hub Solution Designs, Inc..
We evaluated several hosted website building tools, and ended up selecting SiteKreator. It had the right blend of features & functionality, and included reasonably priced site hosting in addition to an easy-to-use web site development tool.
We started redesigning the site on 01/03/08, and launched the new site today, 02/01/08.
Huge sigh of relief – it’s done, and we can move on to other things. Many thanks to Gaurav and Tim for their help in developing content and reviewing the new pages.
There are still some improvements we’d like to make, but the basic site is up, and we can add those improvements as we go.
Please let us know what you think …
