Keynote at Oracle BI SIG Conference
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The Oracle Business Intelligence Special Interest Group, which is part of the Oracle Applications User Group, is hosting Desktop Conference 2008, its annual online conference, in mid-November.
Here’s a brief description:
“Join the Oracle Business Intelligence community in the only global, online business intelligence conference that addresses business intelligence and data warehousing topics related to the Oracle technology stack.”
The SIG president, Faun deHenry of FMT Systems, asked me to do one of the keynote sessions.
It’s titled “Master Data Management 101″ and will be covering:
- what is Master Data Management (MDM)?
- some useful MDM and Data Governance best practices
- what works and what doesn’t
- importance of a holistic approach to MDM
- how to get the political aspects right
- the relationship between MDM and Business Intelligence
The session will be held online on Wed. November 12th at 2:45 pm Eastern, 11:45 am Pacific. Click here to see the agenda and here to register.
MDM in Tough Economic Times
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It’s too early to tell exactly what effect the current economic downturn will have on the Master Data Management (MDM) space.
Software vendors are probably going to see at least a short term slowdown in orders, and consulting firms may already be feeling the effects in terms of canceled or delayed projects.
But unless you’re at one of the financial giants whose troubles are front page headlines, stay the course.
Master Data Management projects are typically so compelling that canceling them is like “burning the furniture”.
A good MDM strategy typically includes a strong business case, with “quick win” elements like increased revenue due to capturing currently missed cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, support for improved analytical marketing, and cost reductions through increased productivity and consolidation of systems and applications not needed after implementing the MDM hub.
I came across a great quote by John Radcliffe at Gartner:
“But there are many other pieces of MDM — like compliance, risk management, cost reduction — that aren’t nice to have, but are essential even if the economic climate is poor. We should see growth in these areas of MDM. They still need to get done and they actually help people during an economic slowdown.”
Perhaps I’m whistling past the graveyard a bit here, but although I’m sure MDM will be affected by global economic conditions, I’m hoping the effects will be less severe and of a shorter duration than other, more hard hit areas of the economy.
I’m planning to attend the Gartner MDM Summit on Nov. 17-19 in Chicago, and I spoke at the SourceMedia / MDM Institute event last week.
Those two events should give me a pretty good “pulse check” on how much impact current economic conditions are having on the MDM space. I’ll report back to you here on what I find, and please comment here to let us know your views and opinions on this question.
Importance of Metrics in Data Governance
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A critical component of any Data Governance program is the tracking of data quality metrics over the life cycle of the data. When a new record enters a Master Data Management system, it does not stay static; it undergoes updates until the last transaction (and beyond).
After the last transaction, at some point, it should be purged to maintain the freshness of the data. At all these stages, the information’s quality, security and compliance can be prone to compromise. A good data governance program should address measurement at these various stages of the data life cycle. Efforts must be made to build suitable metrics, as the organization progresses through the maturity levels of its data governance program.
Here’s an example. As part of the Data Governance program, a company identified one key metric as the “number of validated Ship To addresses”. Why? Because for a significant number of deliveries, FedEx would return the package and charge the company for giving an undeliverable address. And FedEx, as part of its business process, would not let the company know what was wrong with the address or where the correction was needed.
If a company does a large volume of shipments, even a small percentage of returns amounts to a substantial cost. When a data governance program was instituted, the company ensured that for all new customers’ Ship To addresses, the Customer Hub validated the new addresses via FedEx’s web services. FedEx has an elaborate address validation and other shipment-related web services available on its web site.
The company also ensured that any other projects that touched the customer master were aware of this integration. This was published as an official data governance policy. If any other program or user attempted to update the validated address, an approval workflow was initiated. Periodic system refreshes were also developed that would end-date the validated address and create a new validated Ship To address, using U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address service.
For historical customer addresses, the company started doing validations of the “defective” FedEx addresses first and after that set was processed, the remaining addresses were cleansed and validated.
The most important thing to remember is that unless visibility is provided thru a data governance metric, it’s easy for management to lose sight of your accomplishments. Therefore, it’s critical to build the data governance metrics first, even before embarking on an MDM project.
October Column in DM Review
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Here’s a brief excerpt from my latest “MDM Insights” column in DM Review.
A recent article in the Boston Globe titled “Tougher Consumer Data Rule Adopted: Businesses Must Improve Safeguards,” described how “state regulators released new rules … ordering businesses to better safeguard consumers’ personal information.” This got me thinking about the often-overlooked relationship between master data management (MDM), data governance and data security.
Companies that don’t have MDM capabilities yet usually don’t have a data governance organization either. But it’s a critical best practice to implement MDM technology in concert with developing a data governance organization (if not already in place).
Click on “Data Security in Master Data Management” to continue reading.
And please let us know your thoughts by commenting here …
Business Process Execution Language and MDM
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Most IT organizations have to support a wide variety of enterprise software. The legacy applications have proven their reliability over time, in spite of some performance or support issues. The new breed of Java or .Net applications can be complex to code, mostly because their business rules are not well-documented.
The end result is that to support a single business process like “Order to Cash”, multiple applications spread across multiple operating systems and databases are a reality for most IT organizations.
These applications can talk to each other either through point-to-point (tightly coupled) integration or through an Application-to-Application (A2A) (loosely coupled) integration. The latter is emerging as a new trend and is gaining ground among many leading IT shops.
Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL) enables an IT organization to build a single business process, spanning multiple applications thru A2A integration and maintaining the state of each business process instance. This is accompanied by a tool called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), where one can monitor each activity for a given business process.
To connect BPEL to multiple applications, several approaches can be used. One is to use web services, another is simple file transfer, and a third approach is to use message queues to exchange XML messages. For connectivity to popular CRM and ERP systems, the leading BPEL vendors have come out with “adapters” that can connect their BPEL server to some popular platforms (like SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, JD Edwards, etc.).
In any case, these servers provide tools to convert a native message into an XML message as well as perform transformations on XML messages.
The logic related to the business process resides in the BPEL server. If the business requires frequent changes to the logic, some BPEL vendors provide integration to a separate rules engine. The idea is that the business user must be able to change these rules in the rules engine using a simple interface. The changes then take effect directly in the BPEL engine. For working with external organizations, BPEL vendors are continually providing support for EDI, HIPAA and other standard formats.
The availability of Business Process Execution Language technology and its aggressive pricing has a huge implication for MDM adoption. It dramatically reduces the cost to integrate a new MDM hub with existing source systems.
Complex logic based on the source systems can now reside in the BPEL server and an entire business process (such as creating a new customer across multiple applications) can now be visible to the Data Stewardship organization. This is an exciting event! Please comment here about what other implications BPEL might have on MDM and its adoption.
Trip Report on Fall 2008 MDM Summit
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The Fall 2008 MDM Summit conference ended a couple of days ago. Here’s a quick trip report summarizing it.
I’ve attended the last six MDM Summit events in the U.S. and have spoken at five of them. I always enjoy them, because of the great job that SourceMedia and The MDM Institute do, because I enjoy seeing everyone I’ve come to know in the MDM world, and because of the new people I meet and the new ideas I pick up.
This year, I arrived via the Acela Express train from Boston, went straight to the Hilton New York, and attended Evan Levy’s pre-conference workshop on “Best Practices for MDM Delivery: Lessons from the Trenches”.
Most people who attended one of the pre-conference workshop came to the Experts and Analysts Panel, with Jill Dyché, Aaron Zornes and myself, moderated by Jim Ericson, Editorial Director of DM Review. The panel was a lot of fun. I’ve known Aaron for several years and continue to appreciate the quality and depth of his analysis. Jill’s insights were right on the money as usual, and Jim did a great job moderating and guiding the discussion.
After the opening night reception in the exhibit hall, I ran into a friend and fellow consultant, Mani Kumar Manda from Rhapsody Technologies. We went to dinner with Christopher Dwight, Director MDM Field Strategy from Oracle’s Master Data Management team. We had a great time, and talked about Oracle’s Hyperion Data Relationship Management solution and the upcoming Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE 09 conference. Mani and I are involved in planning the MDM track of that conference.
The next morning, I attended Aaron Zornes’ keynote “Milestones on the MDM Road for 2008-2009″, which I particularly like as a way to stay current on developments in MDM over the past six months.
Tony Fisher from DataFlux gave a great talk on “Stop Kicking the Tires and Start Your Master Data Engine”. I first met Tony at the Fall 2006 event, and I chatted briefly with him afterwards about Hub Solution Designs’ interest in becoming a DataFlux partner.
Next was Pascal Laik, VP of MDM Product Strategy at Oracle. I’ve known Pascal for several years, since he took over for Ronda Krier in that position. Pascal laid out Oracle’s strengths in the manufacturing, telecommunications, retail and financial services industries, and included an interesting but apocryphal story about the “Battle of Ulm”, where the Russian army showed up 12 days late for the battle due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars.
Bence Gazdag also spoke about Oracle’s internal MDM efforts, and I later bumped into my friend Bill Miller, Oracle’s Director & Global Solution Owner for Data Quality Management, who was supposed to deliver that part of the presentation.
The last keynote before lunch was by Chris Lucas from D&B and Kim Fahey, Senior Director of Information Architecture at R.R. Donnelley. Kim did a great job describing Donnelley’s MDM journey and the growing value they’ve gotten from their implementation of Purisma.
I had a quick lunch, then headed off to a session on “Best Practices in DG, DQ & Identity Resolution” by Alex Bentley from Initiate Systems and Scott Drummond from Grange Insurance. This one I really enjoyed – down-to-earth delivery by Scott, and lots of good “lessons learned”.
I spent a fair amount of time Monday in the exhibit hall, talking to the different vendors, gathering more information, and seeing old friends working for various companies. I went to the end-of-day reception again, then headed out to a great dinner at the Blue Water Grill with Initiate Systems.
Tuesday was a bit of a blur. I had a couple of meetings in the morning, then went to lunch with Siperian at a great Venetian restaurant named Remi near the Hilton.
In the afternoon, I caught the “Global B2B Hierarchy Management in the High-Tech Industry” session by Jesse Weissman from EMC. Jesse did a great job describing the challenges and corresponding benefits of managing complex corporate hierarchies in EMC’s MDM environment.
The last session I caught was Eric Hansen from Nationwide Insurance, talking about “Data Governance and MDM – The Nationwide Experience”. This one was very well done too, with lots of good insights into the process of developing a vision for data governance in a large-scale Financial MDM project.
Aaron Zornes would want me to remind you about the virtual MDM Summit, which starts on Nov. 11th.
I don’t know the dates yet for next spring’s MDM Summit, but it’s usually in San Francisco and it’s one of my favorite events of the year.
If I met you, spoke to you, had lunch or dinner with you, or learned new things from you – thank you for making the Fall 2008 MDM Summit such a great experience!
Evan Levy’s Workshop at MDM Summit
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I really enjoyed Evan Levy’s session at the MDM Summit on “Best Practices for MDM Delivery: Lessons from the Trenches”.
I heard some great quotes today:
- “Measure data quality levels and continually publish them”
- “Knowing that data is bad is very different from knowing how to correct it”
- “MDM is all about comparing a source system record to the hub’s golden record and asking ‘is it better?’”
- “Do a few things and do them fast.”
- “We’re probably 2-3 years aways from the hubs being really mature and supporting applications smoothly. There’s usually a big impact on how the company has deployed service-oriented architecture.”
- “Do batch first, but don’t forget to design for real-time transactional use too. Get the data problems out of the way first.”
- “A lot of shops profile data during the design phase and never look at it again. Continue to profile during development, and profile the data after it’s loaded. Even profile your data as a production activity.”
Evan’s session was interesting, with a wealth of examples from his years of real-world MDM experience.
Highly recommended!
MDM Summit
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In a few days, I’ll be heading to the Fall 2008 MDM Summit in New York (Sunday, 10/19/08 through Tuesday, 10/21/08). It will be the 6th MDM Summit I’ve attended and the 5th one where I’ve spoken.
I’ll be on an “Experts and Analysts Panel” with Jill Dyché, Partner & Co-Founder of Baseline Consulting and Aaron Zornes, Chief Research Officer of The MDM Institute. The panel is on the first day of the conference (Sun. 10/19) from 5:15 – 6:00 pm. For more information, go to www.mdm-summit.com/MDM/agenda.html.
If you’re interested in meeting, just drop me a note at www.hubdesigns.com/contact_us.html.
It’s always fun to meet the great people who read this blog!
Share Your Knowledge at OAUG COLLABORATE 09
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Hub Solution Designs is a member of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), and I’m the OAUG Education Committee’s track manager for Master Data Management.
We’ve started planning next May’s conference, and we’re looking for strong papers on Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, and Hyperion Data Relationship Management.
Here’s the latest reminder from OAUG on the Call for Papers, which ends October 31st.
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Share Your Knowledge at COLLABORATE 09!
The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest) invite you to share your Oracle knowledge at the premier annual conference for Oracle customers — COLLABORATE 09: Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community, taking place May 3-7, 2009, Orange County Convention Center West, Orlando, Florida.
Submit a presentation proposal by Friday, October 31 to be considered to speak at this leading user-driven event and have the chance to:
- Share best practices and tested solutions for Oracle technologies and applications.
- Enhance your own Oracle knowledge through the peer networking and exchange.
- Learn from Oracle experts and leaders through other education sessions.
If you are an Oracle Applications professional with an interest in Oracle E-Business Suite, Hyperion, Agile, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle Retail, Communications Billing and Revenue Management and MetaSolv Software, as well as applications technology, we invite your proposals for the COLLABORATE 09 — OAUG Forum.
For more specific information about COLLABORATE 09 — OAUG Forum, including tracks, specific industry- or product-related areas of emphasis, presenter requirements and the presentation submission process, please refer to the call for presentations on the COLLABORATE 09 OAUG conference Web site.
Attention Team Oracle! All Oracle employees interested in speaking at COLLABORATE 09 are to contact Michael Neuendorff at michael.neuendorff@oracle.com. Do not submit papers through the official COLLABORATE 09 call for papers!
We look forward to seeing you in Orlando!
Important Paper Submission Dates and Deadlines
- October 31, 2008, 11:59 p.m. EDT: Presentation abstracts due.
- January 12, 2009: Accepted presenters notified by the OAUG.
- January 23, 2009: Acceptance of the compliance agreement due.
- March 8, 2009: All presentation materials including white paper and presentations are due.
What’s in a Name?
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As part of implementing Master Data Management (MDM) for customer information, one needs to define the “customer data model” that will be deployed in the hub.
To do this, quite often, a company will conduct workshops to get agreement on the common definition of “the customer”. The participants are all the groups or departments that touch and use customer data. These may include Marketing, Sales, Finance, Customer Service (and sometimes Legal).
The objective of these workshops is to list out the entities that are in scope for the MDM project, identify the attributes which define an entity, the possible sources of data for that entity, the business purpose of the entity and the consumers of the entity. As a secondary objective, the next step is to define the relationships among the entities and if there is any need for hierarchical representation of these relationships in the hub. But all this is definitely not an easy task to accomplish.
As an example, take the “company name” attribute for a corporation. The Sales function defines the “company name” as the name on the customer’s business card. Legal, however, needs the legal entity’s name and any alternative names, DBAs or tradestyles. Finance may want to identify the corporation with its D&B-provided name (since credit reports may use that). Tax folks may need the previous names under which this customer has transacted. Customer Service gets the “customer name” from the installed base and Marketing gets it from an external list vendor.
So there you go. These are several different potential views just for “company name”. And you thought, agreeing on the “name” definition would be easy!
Similar issues surface when defining the address-related attributes.
By now, you may be asking yourself, “So, does this end up like spaghetti, with no easy way out?”
A better approach is to gather the customer data from various systems and profile that data before the workshops. Observe the variances in “company name” from various systems and build rules based on those variances. Typos can be weeded out. Standards can be designed and proposed to eliminate the “name duplicates”. Use examples proactively. Then based on these findings and the proposed standards, conducting these workshops will be a much smoother task.
Even after this, if there is no agreement, your data model may need multiple “company name” fields to represent the “name” attribute. The objective is to minimize the number of such occurrences.
