One Year Anniversary of This Blog
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We’ve been writing this blog for a year now, with a total of 83 posts so far.
It’s been a very positive experience. We’ve had clients tell us “the reason we hired your firm was because of your blog”. And we’ve gotten lots of great feedback from our partners (Oracle, IBM, SAP, Initiate Systems and Siperian).
What we’ve tried to do is to write for people who are new to Master Data Management (MDM) and looking for basic information (like “Useful Definitions for MDM”,“Five Essential Elements of MDM” and “Ten Best Practices for Master Data Management”).
But we’ve also tried to cover more advanced topics too (such as “Master Data Management and the Art of Politics”, “The Key Requirement in Choosing a Product MDM Hub”, and “Data Governance Critical to MDM Success”).
We thought that by presenting a mix of basic and advanced topics, and highlighting key milestones in the development of the firm, we could keep your interest, and hopefully keep you coming back.
The numbers tell a good story. We’ve had a total of 8,100 hits in the past year, with an average of 32 hits per day (over the last 30 days), 200 hits per week and 835 per month (over the last 6 months).
Our “Top 10″ posts have been:
- Ten Best Practices for Master Data Management
- Our MDM Partnership Strategy
- How Master Data Management is Similar to ERP
- Different Styles of MDM Hub
- Metadata and Master Data Management
- Five Essential Elements of MDM
- Critical Data Quality Questions
- The Key Requirement in Choosing a Product MDM Hub
- Master Data Management and the Art of Politics
- MDM Business Case Creation & ROI Analysis
We get most of our traffic from our web site at www.hubdesigns.com (there’s a prominent “Blog” link there), and from the “Master Data Management” and “Customer Data Integration” tags at WordPress.com. We also get a fair amount from Google Reader, My Yahoo, and my LinkedIn profile.
Our Top 10 search terms that people are using to get to the blog are: “Hub Solution Designs”, “Dan Power”, “Gaurav Arora”, “data quality questions”, “MDM vendors”, “Master Data Management best practices”, “critical to quality”, “Oracle MDM”, “ERP and MDM” and “Master Data best practices”.
We’ve tried to keep the blog vendor-neutral, and have resisted the temptation (so far at least) to accept any form of advertising.
In the coming year, we’re looking forward to more in-depth coverage of the leading MDM and data quality platforms, more insights gleaned from working with our clients, more pointers to other places where our writing appears (like my monthly column in the online edition of DM Review), and continuing to try to break new ground and be thought leaders on MDM.
If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see us cover here, please let us know via a comment. It’s been an honor to write for you over the past year, and we’ll work hard to make this a useful resource for you in the coming year.
July Column in DM Review
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Here’s a quick excerpt from my latest “MDM Insights” column in DM Review.
It’s a long journey from the first efforts of “customer cleanup” to a full-fledged data governance program. But that’s where many companies start. They gradually accept that there are issues with their customer data such as:
- A lack of consistently applied standards and controls,
- Problems arising from conversion of customer data from acquired companies,
- Lack of ownership of customer data,
- Invalid addresses leading to undelivered and returned mail or
- Customer service problems caused by large numbers of duplicate and inaccurate records.
So they form a committee, hire a consulting firm, and involve their internal IT folks. That’s a great start, but it’s important to realize that this is not a once-and-done project.
Click on “From Customer Cleanup to Data Governance” to continue reading.
And please let us know your thoughts by commenting here …
DM Review’s E-Book on MDM Best Practices
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DM Review magazine has an excellent e-book on “Best Practices in Master Data Management”, with a cover story on “Project Management Challenges with a Changing Landscape” by Hub Solution Designs.
You can access it at http://sm.ebookhost.net/dmr/mdm/1/ or http://sm.ebookhost.net/dmr/mdm/1/ebook/1/allcontent.pdf.
Our article begins on page 4.
Please let us know what you think by commenting here.
Building Integration using SOA
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Many companies are still deploying Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), with proprietary adapters and integration servers. However, for a Master Data Management (MDM) solution, we recommend a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach for integration between the hub and source systems using web services.
A typical web server provides Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), so Web browsers can receive pages from a web site.
Application servers provide the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface and host the web services. The web services also provide object components, which provide the business service layer above the applications.
The development time for SOA-based MDM integration will depend on the number of business entities to be exchanged, the availability of a vendor-supplied Software Development Kit for the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), the complexity of the applications to be integrated and the number of Web services to ultimately be deployed.
Some guidelines for developing an SOA integration for an MDM hub are:
- Use XML (eXtensible Markup Language) for all data exchange (XML is a language that provides a standard way of representing data and information).
- Use UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) for listing and locating applications. UDDI is a directory standard that is provided by some application tools as a built-in service to use during integration.
- The WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file should be obtained from the source system to which data needs to be sent or retrieved. WSDL is a “descriptor standard” that an application uses to describe its interface and interaction rules to other applications. WSDL is a document written in XML which describes a Web service. It specifies the location of the service and the operations (or methods) the service provides.
- WSDL should be leveraged with the help of proprietary tools provided for each application to generate the XML message required to meet that data structure.
Currently, some of the Master Data Management platforms (such as Siperian, Initiate Systems, Oracle and IBM) provide excellent SOA libraries of web services.
With some work by the end customer, these products can provide a standard set of data services at the application level. We believe this approach ultimately will give you more flexibility and adaptability than EAI-based integration.
