Favorite MDM-Related Web Sites (Part 1)
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I’ve been building up a Favorites folder of web sites relating to Master Data Management for several years now, so I thought I’d share some of them with you today.
First, I should mention our own site, www.hubdesigns.com. It has some great MDM resources, and we’re updating the Publications page to include our MDM Summit, OAUG Collaborate 08 and DIG 2008 conference presentations.
Another site I find very helpful is www.dmreview.com. And my monthly column, “MDM Insights”, started in their Online Edition last month, discussing Master Data Management and Service-Oriented Architecture.
I’ve always found Aaron Zornes’ analysis of the MDM market and its players very insightful, and I still visit The MDM Institute and the MDM Summit sites pretty often, particularly their MDM product reviews.
On the topic of Data Governance, an area close to my heart, there’s a good blog called the Data Governance Blog, which includes a couple of useful definitions of Data Governance.
A blog I read regularly is Jill Dyché’s Blog. It’s written in a very engaging first person style, but still contains some great nuggets of wisdom about Customer Data Integration, Business Intelligence and Master Data Management.
Another blog that I like is by Steve Sarsfield at Trillium. It has some good content on Data Governance and Data Quality. You can find it at Data Quality Insider.
One of my favorite blog’s is written by Andy Hayler, an industry expert and the founder of Kalido, who has written quite a few good pieces on MDM at Andy on Enterprise Software.
I’ll continue this in “My Favorite MDM-Related Web Sites (Part 2)”.
Tracking and Managing Corporate Hierarchies
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Here’s a great video that illustrates the difficulties in tracking and managing corporate hierarchies:
As the video shows, in today’s acquisition-heavy environment, it’s pretty tough to keep track of all the M&A activity in your customer base. As they say at the ballpark, “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard”.
Having worked for D&B in my previous life, I know they do a good job in maintaining the most important corporate hierarchies, with over 8.7 million company records linked to the appropriate family tree. D&B’s not perfect, but they do try pretty hard. If corporate hierarchies are important to your MDM initiative, think about including D&B early in your planning process.
And thanks to my friends Jack Dally from Transitions [2], and Mani Kumar Manda from Rhapsody Technologies for pointing me to this video.
DM Review Online Edition Column
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Here’s my new monthly column, “MDM Insights”, in the online edition of DM Review.
One of the many “hidden benefits” of a successful master data management (MDM) strategy is the contribution it can make to your enterprise’s move toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Click on “Master Data Management and Service-Oriented Architecture” to continue reading.
Please let me know what you think with your comments here …
Next Week’s DIG Conference
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I’m really looking forward to speaking at next week’s Decisions, Information and Governance conference in Las Vegas, sponsored by The Palladium Group.
And I spoke earlier this week at the New England Oracle SOA Users Group, talking about Master Data Management as a foundation for Service-Oriented Architecture.
MDM initiatives seem to be getting linked to Service-Oriented Architecture or to advanced analytics and business intelligence programs.
I think there can be a problem (but also an opportunity) for MDM in inserting itself between two things that used to talk directly from one to the other (an ERP system to a data warehouse) or (b) asserting itself as a predecessor task to ensure a better outcome (for example, when MDM is used to consolidate and improve the quality of enterprise data before people try to use it in analytics or business intelligence).
While I think it’s true that MDM is in fact needed at most large organizations, having to coordinate with an already-underway SOA initiative, or step back from a planned BI initiative and first tackle MDM, does complicate things a bit. So that’s the “problem” part.
The “opportunity” part is that, for organizations that have the foresight or the luck to tackle MDM first, it makes implementing SOA or achieving business intelligence success that much easier. There’s already a centralized repository of information on customers or products (or whatever domains have been mastered), and that information is proactively managed so that it’s trusted to be accurate, complete, timely and consistent.
Whichever situation your organization is in (tackling MDM first or building it into something else like SOA or advanced analytics), spend the time to develop a workable MDM strategy, using a holistic approach that addresses people, process, technology and information. By all means include an MDM hub in your planning, but make sure you also plan for business process management or sophisticated integration, as well as built-in or bolted-on data quality and enrichment capabilities. And be sure to build a data governance framework around your MDM initiative.
I’ll write a trip report after next week’s DIG conference, to let you know what I thought of the conference itself and whether I got lucky at the tables!
Perspectives on the MDM Market
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In this article, we’ll give some perspective on the current state of the Master Data Management (MDM) market.
Well-meaning skeptics have raised doubts about whether MDM initiatives have long-term viability, sufficient ROI or in fact, are just another system. This skepticism is, of course, understandable.
Every major new type of enterprise technology, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) goes through an adoption cycle, with early enthusiasm leading to the “Trough of Disillusionment” and eventually, the “Plateau of Productivity”. For more information, see Gartner’s definition of Hype Cycles.
And if you look at the history of MDM solutions over the past few years, the space was very fragmented, initially populated mainly by data quality and matching vendors.
But more recently, some innovations have come together in the MDM space so that it’s starting to offer real value to mainstream companies, not just early adopters.
There have been several innovations on the IT architecture front, such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), plus new analytics capabilities, improved tools to facilitate data stewardship and more mature MDM hub platforms. All this adds up to a fast-changing landscape.
To add to the momentum, the top enterprise software players (like Oracle, IBM and SAP) have jumped feet first onto the MDM bandwagon, joining the best-of-breed players (like Purisma, Siperian and Initiate Systems) who helped launch the space, giving rise to a whole new ecosystem of system integrators, data service providers and an increasing trend toward global solutions beyond North America.
This growing ecosystem is driving significant growth for the MDM industry as a whole. There are exciting frontiers ahead.
For example, we’re already seeing some business process outsourcing relating to the creation and maintenance of an organization’s master data to an external provider.
At Hub Solution Designs, we’re excited to be part of the MDM wave of adoption from the very beginning. We see more growth, better solutions, and more organizations succeeding with MDM every day.
Please use the Comment button to let us know what you think about the trend towards outsourced data stewardship.
