MDM and Enterprise Architecture
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Editor’s Note: Another great guest post by Joan Lawson, a talented enterprise architect who worked for one of my clients in the software industry in 2003. For more information on Joan, please see her LinkedIn profile — Dan Power
Master Data Management (MDM) may be one more Three Letter Acronym (TLA), but it’s a central point in the practice of Enterprise Architecture. Together with SOA-based applications and a robust middleware platform, an ideal architecture is readily achievable.
Let’s take an example using party data including customers and prospects. Party data may have a “system of initial record” in any of the many ERP or CRM applications that a company may have.
A message with new party data can be written to the integration platform from the CRM application. Based on business rules, a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) system can orchestrate the data management services in the MDM hub, write the clean party data into the MDM hub, and then message the clean data to the other ERP and CRM applications.
Ditto with product master data.
In this example, customer and product dimensions in the data warehouse are managed by the “source of truth” – the MDM hub. And the fact data for the warehouse (such as quotes, orders, and service events) can be sourced from the OLTP applications.
For those interested in real time monitoring of transactional data, consider placing that data on the integration platform as well. A Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) platform taps into that data to monitor it against KPIs. And once again, the MDM hub provides the “source of truth” for the master data.
The end result? Clean, consistent master data, whether used in the business applications, the data warehouse and business intelligence platform, or in real time business activity monitoring.
Please let us know by commenting here or on the MDM Community if you’re using MDM as part of your enterprise architecture.
Webinar: Top 5 Reasons Not To Master Your Data in SAP ERP
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Siperian, an innovative provider of Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, is teaming up with Dan Power from Hub Solution Designs on a webinar titled “Top Five Reasons Not To Master Your Data in SAP ERP”.
A lot of organizations use SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for their transaction processing, but struggle to manage their non-transactional (or master) data, including customer, product, and supplier information. These types of data require a separate Master Data Management (MDM) system – to streamline business processes, reduce costs, and increase revenue by creating a single view of the customer, product, or supplier.
Dan Power will discuss the following topics during this 45-minute webinar:
- Why SAP ERP is not the right place to master data
- Why a separate MDM system is required for streamlining business operations
- How MDM and SAP ERP coexist
- The technical attributes, strengths and weaknesses of SAP and Siperian MDM products
- The requirements of an effective MDM system and best practices for implementation
This free webinar will be held on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2009 at 11:00 AM Pacific (y:00 PM Eastern), and will include a live question & answer session.
To register, please visit http://forms.siperian.com/content/5Reasons-SAP.
Online Community and Twitter Group for MDM
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In November, I created an online community for everyone involved in Master Data Management.
After attending the Fall 2008 MDM Summit in New York, and the Gartner MDM Summit in Chicago, I was looking for a way to keep that feeling of community alive. Conferences are a great way to see old friends and meet new people, to learn from colleagues, to exchange best practices and lessons learned, and to investigate vendors.
The MDM Community is an attempt to keep that going after everyone heads home. To join, just click here. Please let me know what you’d like to see there.
For those of you on Twitter, I created a Twitter Group for Master Data Management as well. This will help you stay current on breaking news relating to MDM.
To join the Twitter Group for MDM, click here, and to follow Dan Power on Twitter, click here.
MDM and SOA, a Strong Partnership
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Editor’s Note: Today’s post was written by Joan Lawson, a great enterprise architect whom I’ve known since 2003.
For more information on Joan, please see her LinkedIn profile — Dan Power
Let’s not allow Master Data Management (MDM) to become just another silo of data! MDM and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) together, create a strong partnership in your enterprise architecture.
1. Data Quality = Add Quality to SOA
SOA enables business functionality as a service. However, it does not guarantee quality of the data on which it’s operating. That’s a serious gap, which is filled by including MDM in a service-oriented architecture. True business value is realized as services start leveraging the high quality data in the MDM hub and the services which surround it.
2. Data Management Services Offered by the MDM Hub
MDM abstracts the governance of data by consolidating it into a central data model; conducting all data cleansing, augmentation, cleansing, and standardization; and creating a ‘gold standard’ source. These data management functions are centralized in the data hub and are hidden from the consumers of the cleansed data. Maximize the value of these services by consuming them from other applications that need to perform data quality processing external to the data hub.
3. Data Offered by the MDM Hub
Data services allow the consuming application to access and manipulate hub data from a service layer as a supported data source. Layering data services on the MDM hub hides the implementation of federated queries that gather the data requested by the consumer.
4. SOA, MDM, and middleware
SOA, integration middleware (Enterprise Service Bus or ESB), and MDM together can manage the detection of data changes in the source applications and propagate them from the source applications to the MDM – or from the MDM back to the consumers. With the addition of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and a business rules engine, a data change detected in a source can be captured, cause the data quality business rules to be executed on the data, and place the data back on the ESB to be consumed.
Are there other use cases for how MDM and SOA, together, add strength to the enterprise architecture? Please add your thoughts by commenting here or on the MDM Community.
MDM Institute Survey
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Please participate in a short but important survey at http://0036f23.netsolhost.com/1q2009_mdm_update.htm.
The MDM Institute is surveying people at Global 5000 enterprises with active MDM or Data Governance initiatives — e.g., enterprise architects, VPs of infrastructure, corporate data governance managers, et al within enterprises of annual revenues greater than US $1 billion.
The survey can be done in less than 5 minutes, and all respondents completing it by end-of-day Friday, January 30th will receive a scorecard report that participants can share with IT and business management during early February 2009.
Thank you on behalf of The MDM Institute team!
2009 Predictions
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In November, I attended Gartner’s second MDM Summit conference in Chicago.
One of the topics people were talking about at that conference was how well the Master Data Management market would fare in an economic downturn.
Certainly, companies that were just “testing the waters” on MDM may cancel or slow down their initiatives, and anyone making the front pages or the nightly news (and not in a good way) is probably going to see some disruption to their Master Data Management efforts.
But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much interest and activity we’ve seen, particularly since 2009 started.
Friends in the MDM space report getting a slew of new opportunities recently, especially in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Industries like that are doing relatively well, and even in affected industries like retail, some companies are “swimming against the tide” and investing into the downturn, looking to take market share and revenue from their competition who are cutting investments and going into hibernation mode.
Barney Beal on SearchDataManagement.com described the picture at BJ’s Wholesale Club:
[John Polizzi, senior vice president and CIO] “Our plan was not an investment in a master data management (MDM) system, or an ERP implementation, or a point of sale (POS), but rather all of them — and more. BJ’s is embarking on a five-year transformation of its IT infrastructure and systems.”
Philip Lay, managing director of TCG Advisors, who spoke at the Gartner conference, said “now is the time to buck conventional wisdom and ‘think like a contrarian’ when it comes to MDM.” Lay advised the attendees “the key to making a successful business case for MDM is to tie MDM to specific, broken business processes” and quantify that impact.
I wrote an article for DM Review on “Easing into Master Data Management” which describes how to get started by building a data governance program first, with existing resources and applications, and tackling data quality and data integration as predecessor steps to MDM.
Certainly, one of the classic drivers for MDM has always been reducing costs – and that’s even more important in a recession (look for a guest post on this topic in a few days from Ravi Shankar at Siperian).
But even more important is to grow the “top line” – to increase revenue and pull customers away from your competitors, through better information, better customer service, better products, better pricing, you name it.
In 2009, I predict the MDM market will be affected somewhat by the recession, but it will still be one of the fastest-growing software segments, as Gartner has been predicting too.
But let’s tap into YOUR collective intelligence – what do you think? Please comment here or on the MDM Community.
New Year’s Resolutions for Hub Designs Blog
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Courtesy of Sally M.
Although 2008 was a tough year for many people, it was a great year for this blog.
We wrote some well-received articles, and learned a lot about Master Data Management, Data Governance, blogging and social networking. We had almost 13,000 page views for the year, growing more than 20% per month.
In 2009, I’d really like to keep improving this blog. But to do that, I need your help.
Here are the top three New Year’s resolutions for the Hub Designs blog. If you think there’s something I should add, please let me know by commenting here.
(1) More and Better Posts! Content is king for a blog. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback, and the blog has surely gotten better over the past year, but there’s plenty of room to improve. We can share our perspective on MDM news and announcements, provide more “MDM 101″ articles on core components of MDM technology, and share more insight on the “people” and “process” aspects of Master Data Management and Data Governance.
(2) More interaction with the MDM community – We’ve got the Hub Designs web site (which you can join using Google Friend Connect), this blog, our monthly newsletter, our articles & presentations, and we participate regularly on Twitter. We recently started an MDM Jobs Board and an online MDM Community. We also maintain a Twitter Group and a Squidoo Lens on MDM, and we try to be active in the relevant LinkedIn Groups.
But there’s more I could do. Two ideas I had recently were an “MDM People” section, where individuals looking for new positions could list themselves for free, and “office hours”, where I’d make myself available for 1-2 hours per week to answer questions on MDM and Data Governance (I’d probably use the MDM Community’s online chat function for that).
(3) More thought leadership — I spend a considerable amount of time staying current on trends in MDM, and trying to “look around the corner” to envision changes and disruptions that may be coming in the next few years. In addition to sharing them with our consulting clients, we’ll try to include more of that here, so you’ll be able to stay on the cutting edge as well.
So that’s my starting point on what we can do to improve in 2009. What should do more of? Less of? What should we change? Please give us your thoughts by commenting!
