Gartner MDM Summit 2011 Off to a Strong Start
The Gartner MDM Summit 2011 is in its second day. It’s off to a great start, with over 500 attendees. Read more 
Launching Hub Designs Magazine
The Hub Designs Blog is becoming the Hub Designs Magazine! Read more
Hub Designs Sponsoring Gartner MDM Summit for 3rd Year
Next week, Hub Designs will be exhibiting at the Gartner MDM Summit for the third year in a row. Read more
Announcing the Hub Designs MDM Think Tank
Hub Designs gets requests pretty frequently from various MDM vendors to brief us on their latest products, “go to market” strategies, acquisitions, future directions, positioning, etc. Read more
MDM Is Not Only About Aligning “Business” and “IT” (Part 1)
Business and IT alignment is a topic repeated ad nauseam. There seems to be a belief that the Holy Grail of IT is achieved once that alignment is in place. This belief applies strongly to Master Data Management (MDM) as well. Read more
Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 2
This is the third article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP. Here are Part One and Part Two of the series. Read more
Getting Started with Data Governance, Part 1
This is the second article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP. You can find the first article in the series here. Read more
Golden Relations and Platinum Relations, by Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen
“Golden copy” is a term widely used in master data management (MDM), as we often see the master data hub as a golden copy of the data in the company’s operational databases. Read more
Oracle 2011 MDM Strategy and Roadmap
This session at COLLABORATE 2011 was presented by Manoj Tahiliani, Senior Director of MDM Product Management & Strategy at Oracle. Read more
The Strategic Nature of MDM According to Oracle
This week, I attended David Butler’s presentation at the Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE 11 conference in Orlando, FL. Read more
COLLABORATE 11′s MDM Track
I arrived in Orlando, FL this morning for COLLABORATE 11, the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) conference. This year, the Master Data Management (MDM) track looks outstanding. Read more
Senior Level MDM Position at Microsoft
From time to time, Hub Designs highlights an MDM-related position as a courtesy to a friend of the firm. This position is being listed for Steve Minor at Microsoft, whom I’ve known for several years. Read more
A New Look for the Hub Designs Blog
Ah spring! Time for a new look here on the Hub Designs Blog. Read more
Talend MDM Celebrates Its One Year Birthday
Jim Walker, who handles MDM Product Marketing at Talend, sat down with us recently for an analyst briefing to fill us in on how Talend is doing with its Talend Master Data Management product. Read more
It’s Good To Be On The First Page of Google
Google Search Results Heat Map
I was doing some research recently on the search terms that bring people to the Hub Designs Blog. So I took a few minutes and found that for the most frequently used 40 search terms over the past year that I looked at, the Hub Designs Blog was in the Top 10 search results on Google for every single one, with an average position of Google’s search results page of third. That, to me, is amazing. Read more
Why Govern Master Data?
This is the first article in an ongoing series on Data Governance sponsored by SAP.
The most important thing about data governance is to “start from where you are”. Most companies are just getting started on their data governance journeys. It can be hard to admit that your company is at data governance maturity level 0 or 1. But the most critical step is the first one – getting started. Read more
The MDM Track at OAUG COLLABORATE 11
I’ve been a volunteer member of the Education Committee of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) for several years now, serving as the “track manager” for Master Data Management (MDM). Read more
Things That Make You Go Hmmm (Part 2)
The “Chicken Little Syndrome” is a concept in Cognitive Psychology that states how the human mind fills in gaps of understanding and jumps to conclusions.
For example, Deborah sits at home wondering why Dave hasn’t called yet. Dave must have a reason for not calling. The reason must be that he is angry. What did she say to anger him? It must have been their last phone conversation. She remembers making a comment about Steve, his good friend who’s also a friend of her brother. He must have told Steve, and now Steve is trying to drive a wedge between them. The nerve of Steve. The next time she sees Steve, she plans to… and then … Dave knocks at the door to surprise her with flowers and take her to dinner. Deborah jumped to conclusions with no factual base at all. And each jump brought her farther from the truth than before. After telling Dave of her rationalizations, Dave calls her neurotic, runs out the door, and calls Steve on his way to the sports bar to tell him never to setup him up on a blind date again. Hey, not all stories have a happy ending!
As kids, we all played the group game “I’ve got a secret”. It starts in a big circle where one person tells the one on his left a few unrelated gossip items. That person tells the person on their left what they heard, and so on. When it gets to the end, the last person proclaims the gossip they heard and it is compared to the original gossip. I used to think that childhood attention deficit was the explanation for how the truth gets distorted until I saw the same results in adults at a party. I then realized the obvious explanation; those kids must have been drinking too.
So, how does this all relate to Master Data Management (MDM)?
Businesses cannot afford to jump to conclusions and need to make their decisions based on reliable information. The better the quality, integration, and standardization of the information, the more precise analyses can be. Speculation should only exist in running “what if” scenarios which should model several possible outcomes, not just the single worst case like Deborah did.
And as information flows through an organization, it changes just as in the party game. Without strict governance rules and controls, information can easily change its meaning or become completely corrupt and unusable. Or worse, information could appear usable and be taken as fact when it truly is incorrect or not correct for the applied purpose.
Consider your MDM strategy and ensure the word “Master” really applies. Consumers of MDM information should rely on the Master information, not a version of it that has been passed through multiple “gossip-like” systems. Oh, and tell your kids not to drink.
Matching (That Is, Entity Resolution) Revisited
I got a couple of e-mails from a friend over the past few days, and he asked some great questions about matching (or entity resolution, as Infoglide Software prefers to call it).
His first question was about AbiliTec IDs for individuals. He wondered if this was an Axciom product or an industry standard identifier. He was looking for a way to uniquely identify customers from the web, retail point-of-sale (POS), and other marketing channels for a client who doesn’t have any useful way of identifying the same customer across channels.
I’m familiar with AbiliTec IDs (Acxiom calls them AbiliTec links). It’s a persistent identification scheme for consumers and addresses, issued and controlled by Acxiom, similar to how D&B issues and controls the D-U-N-S Number for businesses. There’s a good brochure available on Acxiom’s UK website.
To answer his specific questions, it’s definitely an Acxiom product, not an industry or open standard identifier. So one can only get AbiliTec links by working with Acxiom in some way, shape or form.
As far as uniquely identifying individuals across channels like the web, retail POS, and other marketing outlets, that’s pretty much exactly what AbiliTec is used for – think of it as a high speed matching engine that will return AbiliTec links for every consumer record you feed it. The downside is you’ve got to pay Acxiom for the privilege. But like D&B, they’re pretty good at helping you create the business case to justify the expense.
Then my friend came back with another question: are there any competing products for the AbiliTec link?
My answer was: none that I know of that are as widely accepted. The three consumer credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) all sell their own persistent consumer IDs too, but in my opinion, Acxiom’s is very good at that particular task.
Products like DataFlux, Trillium, Informatica, IBM’s QualityStage and SAP BusinessObjects can also generate a key with the same value given varying input, so that different representations of the same person, such as
- John O’Connor, 30 Palomino Lane, Westwood MA 02090
- J. J. Oconnor, 303 Palomino Lane, Westwood MI 02093
- John Joseph Connor, 30 Polo Pony Court, Westawooda RI 02021
will all generate the same key value. So you can use that generated key to identify the person across three different channels.
Of course, it all depends how well you write and tune your business rules, too. If you write them too tight, then the three records above won’t generate the same key after all. Write them too loose, and a bunch of other records will also generate that same key value and you’ll end up with a bunch of false positives (non-Johns).
The beauty of Acxiom’s approach (and D&B’s for that matter when you’re interested in businesses) is that they’ve both got anywhere from hundreds of millions to billions of records of reference data to work with – both to refine their match engine and business rules, and to match against.
So when you’re comparing records, you’re not just comparing these three representations against one another, you’re comparing them to all of the historical addresses this person has lived at over the last 25 years, and all of the other versions of their name of file from marriages, divorces and name changes. Don’t underestimate the power of the database!
You can retweet this by cutting and pasting < New on the Hub Designs Blog: “Matching (That Is, Entity Resolution) Revisited” at http://wp.me/p5Tdn-yS >
Image courtesy of Infoglide Corporation
How To Build A Roadmap
How many of us in the consulting profession can truly say we’ve been taught to develop, refine, and deliver a professional strategy roadmap based on a sound method with consistently repeatable results? Having been at this crazy business for years, I’m still astonished at the wide variety of quality in the results I see over the years – and it’s not getting any better.
I’m not sure I can identify why this is so. Maybe it’s the consolidation and changes in the traditional consulting business (Big Eight to what? two, maybe) or the depreciation of the craft itself among our peers. Then again, maybe sound planning went out of style and I just didn’t get the memo. No matter what the root cause(s) is, I want to take a little time and share some (not all) of what’s worked for me with great success over the years and maybe make your next roadmap better.
I’m no genius, I just believe I’ve been blessed to come into the industry at a time when the large management consulting firms actually invested in intellectual property and shared this with the “new hires” and up-and-coming people like me. Investing in structured thinking, communication skills, or just plain good old analytic skills makes sense. Why there isn’t more of this kind of investment today is truly troubling.
What I’m going to share works well across most transformation programs. You will struggle to find this in textbooks, class rooms, or your local book store (I’ve looked, but maybe not hard enough). The method I’ll share here is based loosely on the SEI-CM IDEAL model used to guide development of long-range integrated planning for managing software process improvement programs. You will most likely find something similar to this in the best and brightest organizations who’ve adopted an optimized way to think about how to guide their organizations to perform as expected (some of us call this “experience”). Now on to the summary of what I want to share, the balance will be revealed in an upcoming series using the adoption of Master Data Management technology and data governance organization and processes as an example.
The Overall Pattern
At the risk of over-simplifying things, here is the overall pattern ALL roadmaps follow:
Click to enlarge
1) Develop a clear and unambiguous understanding of the current state
- Business Objectives (not just strategy or goals, real quantifiable objectives)
- Functional needs
- High impact business processes or cycles
- Organization (current operating model)
- Cost and complexity drivers
- Business and technical assets (some call these artifacts)
2) Define the desired end state
First, (I know this is obvious) what are you trying to accomplish? Is there an existing goal-driven strategy clearly articulated into quantifiable objectives? This sounds silly doesn’t it, and if this exists and no one knows about it or cannot clearly communicate what the end game is, we have a problem. It could be a well guarded secret. Or what is more common, the line of sight from executive leadership down to the mail room is broken, where no one knows what the true goals are or cares (it’s just a job after all) becomes a annual charade of “Management by Objective” objectives with no real understanding. Some better examples I would expect include:
- Performance targets (Cash flow, Profitability, Velocity [cycle or PCE], Growth, Customer intimacy)
- Operating Model Improvements
- Guiding principals
3) Conduct Gap Analysis
Okay, this is where the true fun starts. Once here we can begin to evaluate the DELTA between who we realistically are, and what we truly want to become. Armed with a clear understanding of where we are and where we want to be, the actionable activities begin to fall out and become evident. Gap closure strategies can then begin to be discussed, shared, and resolved into any number of possibilities usually involving the following initiatives:
- Organizational
- Functional
- Architectural (technology)
- Process
- Reward or economic incentives
For the enterprise architect, the following diagram illustrates a sample index or collection of your findings to this point, focused across the four architecture domains (Business, Information, Application, and Technology) related to the architecture. Note how this is aligned into the enterprise architecture meta-model you can see over at the Essential Project. The DELTA in this case represents the recommended Gap Closure Strategy between the current state and the desired end state. Or put simply, the actionable things we need to do to close the gap between where are, and where we want to be.
Click to enlarge
4) Prioritize
Now that we have the list of actionable items, it’s time to prioritize what is front of us. This is usually driven (in a technology road map) by evaluating the relative business value AND the technical complexity, plotting the results in a quadrant graph of some kind. It is critical here that the stakeholders are engaged in the collection of the data points and they are keenly aware of what they are scoring. At the end of the day, what we are doing here is IDENTIFYING what is feasible and what has the highest business value. I know, I know – this sounds obvious, and you would be astonished by how frequently this does not occur.
5) Discover the Optimum Sequence
Okay, now we have the initiatives, the prioritization, how about sequence? In other words, are there things we have to get accomplished first, before others? Are there dependencies we have identified that need to be satisfied before moving forward? This sounds foolish as well, and we sometimes we need to learn how to crawl, walk, run, ride a bike, and then drive a motor vehicle. And what about the capacity for any organization to absorb change? Hmmm… Not to be overlooked, this where a clear understanding of the organizational dynamics is critical (see step number 1, this is why we need to truly understand where we are).
6) Develop the Road Map
Now we are ready to develop the road map. Armed with the DELTA (current vs. desired end state), the prioritization effort (what should be done), and the optimum sequence (in what order), we can begin to assemble a sensible, defensible road map describing what should be done in what order.
How this is communicated is critical now. We have the facts, we have the path outlined, and we have a defensible position to share with our peers. We have the details readily available to support our position. Now the really difficult exercise rears its ugly head. Somehow, we need to distill and simply our message to what I call the “Duckies and Goats” view of the world. In other words, we need to distill all of this work into a simplified yet compelling vision of how we transform an organization, or enabling technology to accomplish what is needed.
Do not underestimate this task, after all the hard work put into an exercise like this, the last thing we need to do is to confuse our stakeholders with mind-numbing detail. Yes, we need this for ourselves to exhaust any possibility we have missed something. And to ensure we haven’t overlooked the obvious – not sure who said this but “when something is obvious, it may be obviously wrong”. Here is another example of a visual diagram depicting an adoption of Master Data Management platform in its first year.
Click to enlarge
So, this is the basic pattern describing how a robust roadmap should be developed for any organization across any discipline (business or technology) to ensure an effective planning effort.
I wanted to share this with you to help you with your own work; this is usually not an exercise to be taken lightly. We are after all discussing some real world impacts to many, all the while understanding the laws of unintended consequences, to come up with a set of actionable steps to take along the way that just make sense. This method has worked for me time after time. I think this may just work for you as well. More on this later in the next article in this series …
Orchestra Networks Recognized by BNP Paribas
I spoke today with Christophe Barriolade, CEO of Orchestra Networks. His firm was just recognized by BNP Paribas, the largest bank in Europe and one of Orchestra’s biggest customers, for their contributions to BNP Paribas’ master data management (MDM) strategy.
BNP Paribas took the unusual step of communicating on its corporate web site about their MDM strategy, and recognizing Orchestra Networks as its IT solutions developer and development partner.
BNP Paribas, which is #18 on the 2010 Fortune Global 500, has annual revenues of $130.7 billion and more than 182,000 employees. In 2009, the bank set up an MDM shared service center and established a community of project owners and project managers from several parts of the bank to “capitalize on shared experiences and to promote the adoption of best practices with respect to the management of master data.”
To date, BNP Paribas has adopted Orchestra Networks’ EBX platform, as well as IBM’s InfoSphere MDM Server for Product Information Management.
Christophe Barriolade said this was the first time a large account had taken the step of featuring Orchestra Networks so prominently on its own web site. BNP Paribas now has three years of experience in working with EBX, and the MDM shared service center is starting to have a positive impact on their business.
Since 2010, when a global license for EBX was negotiated, Orchestra Networks has been used at BNP Paribas on an enterprise-wide basis. EBX now provides a multidomain MDM solution for the bank, including “risk management, human resources, real estate, suppliers and even shared terminology”.
Hub Designs is independent with regards to competing technologies, and we partner with all of the major MDM vendors. By partnering with all but not formally aligning with any, we’re able to remain objective. But it’s always nice to see one of our partners recognized like this, and to have something worth celebrating.
“Data Governance In The Cloud” Seminar, March 24th in Atlanta
Orchestra Networks Launches EBX5 – the Next Generation of its MDM Hub
Orchestra Networks is launching EBX5, the new version of its flagship product, today (Feb. 8, 2011).
Hub Designs was briefed on it recently, much as we receive briefings from other MDM vendors such as Oracle, Informatica, Initiate Systems (now part of IBM), Kalido and Varonis.
This is a big release for Orchestra Networks – the culmination of 18 months of development, and it will define their market strategy for the coming year.
The company made a lot of progress in 2010. It landed ten new customers, including six in the Global 500, and announced partnerships with a number of global and regional systems integrators. A big accomplishment, which we covered here, was being positioned on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM of Product Data. This is quite an achievement, because Gartner’s criteria for inclusion on the Magic Quadrant are quite strict. Orchestra Networks also hired a sales team and established a direct presence in the US and Canada, which helped the company be more accessible to its North American customers. The company also sponsored a white paper titled A Real Multidomain MDM Solution or a Wannabe? by Hub Designs that was published in September.
Orchestra’s 2011 strategy includes increasing its US market presence, growing its Sales and Professional Services teams, a Platinum sponsorship at the Gartner MDM Summit 2011, the launch of EBX5 (a major new release), and new functional solutions for business users.
One thing I found very interesting is that Orchestra Networks has surveyed its customers and found that 80% of them are using EBX for multidomain MDM. Orchestra has also got a solid start on growing its North American presence, with customers like the National Bank of Canada, NetSpend, and Schlumberger, and with more than 30 customers total from a dozen industries worldwide.
One thing I’ve liked about Orchestra Networks since we started to work with them in June 2010 is the company isn’t afraid to take a different approach from other MDM vendors. They call it “MDM Redefined”, and they contrast their product versus the other vendors as allowing full business user ownership of MDM; true multidomain MDM (as opposed to former Product Information Management and Customer Data Integration products, which are too rigid and specific for multiple domains); and providing all MDM features in one product, as opposed to including up to 5 products that need to be integrated. Having talked to some of their customers in depth, I’d say they come pretty close to these goals.
Their product is a 100% web-based solution, which aims to deliver a user-centered experience. A very important part of Orchestra Networks’ design philosophy is that their product is a model-driven solution, which means that the implementing team can build true multidomain MDM hubs. Orchestra likes to call the result: “What You Model is What You Get”, which illustrates the importance of data modeling on both the business and technical sides of your team.
Orchestra Networks aims to provide “Enterprise MDM in One Product”, with all of the following features under a single umbrella, to allow customers to gain complete control of the master data life cycle:
- Master Data Modeling: semantic modeling with an intuitive web experience, complex data types, relationships and hierarchies, advanced inheritance and calculated values, and a multi-language dictionary
- Master Data Quality: validation rules enforced at the point of entry (a personal crusade of mine), a business rules editor, a validation engine with reporting capability, and advanced data quality with stewardship workflows and survivorship. No third party data quality tools required.
- Master Data Authoring: a dynamic user interface, sophisticated hierarchy management, advanced views and data maintenance features, an inheritance engine.
- Master Data Governance: fine-grained role-based security, built-in collaborative workflow, easy workflow configuration
- Master Data Timeline: control past, present and future versions of data at the same time, “What If?” impact analysis, “As Of?” record-level history, “Who did What?” real-time monitoring,
- Master Data Lineage: source/target systems mapping, cross-referencing, impact analysis, auditing
- Master Data Integration: Data Staging, real-time and bulk data services, ready for variety of middleware platforms, optional EBX5 data integration services (3rd party tool – not yet announced), IT landscape integration
- Master Data Scalability: vertical scalability (HX for very large data sets, up to 100 million records, deploys to standard RDBMS), and horizontal scalability (Distributed Data Delivery or D3 for clustering for MDM in SOA and geographical federation)
Orchestra Networks has also developed “functional solutions” for the following three use cases, with Global 500 references in each domain, a developing go-to-market partner ecosystem and best practices and data model templates:
- MDM for Finance & Accounting
- MDM for Human Resources
- MDM for Sales & Marketing
I think this is a great move, because many of the elements of a good MDM solution can be replicated from one company to another, and it’s the intended use that drives the solution design.
In the “MDM for Finance & Accounting” use case, the key master data are things like GL accounts, cost centers, organizational hierarchies, and assets. The business drivers include mergers & acquisitions, global vs. local finance, corporate standards & government regulations, and ease of sharing information with other corporate functions and departments. The main features of EBX5 are hierarchy management, version control, built-in workflow, role-based security, auditing, and data lineage.
In the “MDM for HR” use case, the key master data are items like the employee master, organizational structures, and HR reference data and widely used codes. The business drivers include the need to offer new HR services, M&A, HR outsourcing, adapting to local markets & regulations, better business intelligence, and the need to sharing information across the enterprise. The main features of EBX5 are hierarchy management, version control, built-in workflow, role-based security, auditing, and lineage.
In the “MDM for Sales & Marketing” use case, the key master data are items like the products & services master, territories, the party master, and locations. The business drivers include reducing time-to-market, improving BI, multi-channel commerce, global MDM (not just PIM), and sharing with other departments. The main features of EBX5 are data & rules modeling, hierarchy management with inheritance, change management & approvals, and version control.
I saw a demo of EBX5 that was significantly more user friendly than the previous version, while allowing more on-the-fly changes to the underlying data model (provided you have the right security privileges, of course). Orchestra Networks showed how their product can manage complex hierarchies, such as 30,000 cost centers in a geographic hierarchy, and easily move nodes between parents.
The workflow-based master data authoring capability was very compelling, allowing a data governance team to set up exactly how a new customer, product, employee, etc. should be entered into the MDM hub, with data quality and other business rules built into the workflow. From a data governance perspective, even the most complex corporations should be able to model their “real world” operations and design their master data Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) processes using EBX5.
Hub Designs has been working with and following Orchestra Networks for almost a year now, and we’ve been impressed with the integrity and commitment to quality that Orchestra has. The new version of their flagship product, EBX5, reflects that focus, and promises to be even more powerful and flexible than the previous release.
MDM Community Member’s Survey
Hub Solution Designs sponsors The MDM Community, a social network and online community for master data management and data governance practitioners, with over 420 members from 34 countries.
A member of that community, Mohd Khairi, reached out to me recently for help in his research. He’s collecting data about MDM architectural models for his Ph.D. dissertation. He’s put together some questions in the form of a survey. He’s already gotten some responses on the The MDM Community, which was great, but I thought we’d open it up to all of our readers here, in order to give him a better sample size for his research.
Here’s a brief writeup from Mohd on what he’s trying to achieve with his survey:
In Master Data Management (MDM), centralized and federated architectural models play a major role in managing master data. The centralized model allows an organization to organize and manage master data in a single, centralized repository. Alternatively, a federated model doesn’t keep the master data in one database, instead it allows users to query the master data from multiple sources using the MDM tool. Project leaders and company stakeholders have to choose the right model for their organizations. This study examines the centralized and federated models and provides decision makers with insights into determining the proper model for their organization.
Please help our colleague with his study by answering the survey questions using this link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MDM_Survey_Update.
Thank you in advance for your help!
Image credit (c) 2010 Rob Nguyen
Latest Article in Information Management Magazine
The January/February 2011 issue of Information Management magazine is out, and my column is titled “Data Modeling: The Lingua Franca of a Successful MDM Effort”.
Here’s a brief excerpt from the article:
There are two types of master data management platforms available today: those with prebuilt data models developed by the software vendor and those that are model-driven, where the implementing company constructs the data model based on its requirements. In the second scenario, project team members from business and IT work together to create data definitions and business rules; this process defines the MDM data model.
One could debate the merits of which is better.
You can read the rest of the article here. Please let us know what you think of it by using the “Leave a Comment” link on this page.
Hub Designs Blog’s Top 10 for 2010
Inspired by Crysta Anderson from Initiate, who put together IBM’s Mastering Data Management blog Top 10 Posts of 2010, I decided to put together a similar “Top Ten Posts of 2010″ for the Hub Designs Blog.
In our holiday greetings article, Thank You To Our Readers, we covered some of the top articles from the beginning of this blog in July 2007, and included some readership statistics, which we won’t bore you with today.
Our reports on MDM vendors like Oracle, IBM Initiate, Informatica (formerly Siperian), Kalido, and Orchestra Networks were very popular in 2010. And our series on MDM best practices, practicing enterprise architecture within MDM (by Jim Parnitzke) and on data profiling (by Rob DuMoulin) were also big hits.
Without further ado, here’s the Hub Designs Blog “Top 10 for 2010″.
- Oracle’s MDM Strategy and Roadmap – A look at Oracle’s MDM strategy and roadmap, from the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) COLLABORATE conference in April 2010.
- Building MDM-Powered Solutions with Initiate Composer – A description of Initiate’s new Composer product, which is a framework for building solutions on top of IBM’s Initiate Master Data Service hub.
- Master Data Management Best Practice Series, by Dan Power – A ten part series on MDM and data governance best practices, based on my presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2010.
- Modeling the MDM Blueprint, by James Parnitzke – A six part series on applying important enterprise architecture concepts to MDM projects.
- Data Profiling For All The Right Reasons, by Rob DuMoulin – A five part series on data profiling and its role within MDM and data governance initiatives.
- Siperian Acquired By Informatica – My analysis of Siperian’s acquisition by Informatica, written on the day the news broke.
- Informatica Analyst Briefing – Hub Designs is regularly briefed by the major MDM vendors; this one by Informatica was about 2 months after the acquisition. A later briefing from October 2010 can be found here.
- Kalido MDM and AB InBev – I live blogged this at the Gartner MDM Summit during a session by Kalido’s President and CEO Bill Hewitt and Jonathan Starkey, the Director of Business Intelligence at AB InBev North America.
- Intersection of MDM, CRM and ERP – My article on Why Product Information Management in Information Management magazine sparked a short blog article by Andrew White of Gartner. The “Intersection of MDM, CRM and ERP” article is in response to Andrew’s.
- Orchestra Networks Enters Gartner Magic Quadrant – We thought it was newsworthy that Orchestra Networks, a specialized MDM vendor, was included in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data” for the first time. Also, Orchestra Networks sponsored a white paper titled A Real Multidomain MDM Solution or a Wannabe? by Hub Designs that was published in September.
It’s been a busy 2010. I recently read the 2009 Year in Review from this time last year, and was exhausted just reading it, but this year has been the same – several conferences (Gartner MDM Summit, OAUG COLLABORATE, Oracle OpenWorld, Kalido), webinars (with eLearning Curve, TechTarget and Oracle Applications Users Group) and some exciting things to look forward to and update you on in 2011.
I’d like to to thank my wife and two boys for their unwavering support throughout 2010 – and my heartfelt thanks to the folks on the Hub Designs team - I couldn’t do it without you!
And thank you – as always – for your readership and support. Happy New Year!
MDM Solution Specialist / Senior Manager at Oracle
From time to time, Hub Designs highlights an MDM-related open position as a courtesy to a friend of the firm.
Oracle’s Applications Solution Group (ASG) is part of the North American Sales organization, and is responsible for, among other things, fueling the growth strategies of the Public Sector’s applications sales teams by providing innovative Edge solutions, creating compelling applications upgrade programs, and driving successful early adopters of new applications. In addition, the ASG is responsible for delivering clear, relevant content and enablement to assist in demand creation and customer roadmap activities.
Oracle’s Master Data Management (MDM) solution is a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) set of applications (MDM Hubs) designed to consolidate, cleanse, enrich, and synchronize key business data objects across the enterprise and across time. It includes pre-defined comprehensive data models with powerful applications to load, cleanse, govern and share the master data with all business processes, operational applications and business intelligence systems. The MDM solution provides Public Sector customers with the ability to overcome problems associated with poor quality and fragmented data that are typically inherent with major programs such as citizen services, social services, child welfare, revenue collections, fraud detection, vendor file management, regulatory compliance, financial controls and site consolidations.
Overlay sales personnel provide specialist product expertise to the sales force. Manages and directs a staff of solution specialists and/or managers in providing specific industry or product expertise to facilitate the closing of deals within sales territory. Establishes and communicates departmental objectives and implements plans to ensure attainment of business objectives. Works closely with sales management to ensure proper utilization of resources and provides justification for additional resource requests. Oversees the Interaction with sales team to architect the solution, and develop and execute solution strategies for market. Manages teams in the sales process for establishing market visibility and deal visibility. Develops forecasts. Participates in industry/product functions, seminars and round tables to remain up to date on industry or product knowledge. May deliver presentations/solutions to high level clients and industry conference attendees. May provide training to field sales on industry/solutions.
Manages and controls activities in multi-functional areas or sections. Ensures appropriate operational planning is effectively executed to meet business needs.
The person in this position will serve as a Solutions Specialist supporting Oracle’s Master Data Management sales activities as part of a team that comprises other ASG members and personnel from various North American Public Sector organizations, including business development, program management, field sales and Industry Business Unit Solutions Specialists.
The Oracle MDM solution includes the following:
- MDM Hubs such as Oracle Customer Hub, Oracle Product Hub, Oracle Supplier Hub and Oracle Site Hub.
- Oracle Data Quality Servers, providing end-to-end data quality for structured data (and Oracle Product Data Quality accommodates unstructured data).
- In addition to the Data Hubs, Oracle MDM includes Data Relationship Management (DRM), a powerful financial reference data master, with best in class hierarchy management capabilities and a business enterprise dimension-mastering tool with deep integration into Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).
MDM represents one of the fastest growing areas for Oracle’s solutions in the government marketplace.
Responsibilities include:
- Develop strategic & tactical plans for Oracle’s MDM solution for the Public Sector (US Federal, State & Local & Canadian governments), including the Data Hub components identified above
- Build clear and differentiated messaging and value propositions for the appropriate target audiences.
- Work with the field sales force to create forecasts and provide status reports regarding revenue quotas
- Work closely with product development & management, business development,
- program management and field sales to develop pipelines and meet revenue quotas
- Assess competitive products and analyze trends to effectively position MDM for Public Sector solutions
- Meet with Public Sector customers to make MDM presentations to convey value propositions for productivity improvements and cost savings
Qualifications:
- Knowledge of and demonstrated experience with MDM software solutions
- Hands-on experience (configuration, implementation, architecture) of MDM products.
- Experience with the data quality components such as Informatica or Product Data Quality
- Knowledge of and demonstrated experience with Public Sector enterprise business processes
- 10+ years of experience in supporting enterprise software sales
- Demonstrated success in devising strategies and supporting end-to-end sales plans and revenue quota achievement
- Proven leadership and “take charge” skills
- Ability to effectively and efficiently work in cross-functional teams and matrix environments.
As part of Oracle’s U.S. employment process, candidates will be required to complete a background check, prior to an offer being extended. These background checks include:
- Prior Employment Verification
- Education Verification
- Social Security Trace
- Criminal Background Check
- Motor Vehicles Records (where required for position)
For a listing of all opportunities at Oracle, please go to www.irecruitment.oracle.com
Oracle Supports Workforce Diversity.
To apply for this position, please contact:
Julie Boyer, Oracle Recruiting at 434-973-0898 or julie.boyer@oracle.com
Thank You To Our Readers
Well, another year has nearly passed, and I’d like to say “thank you” to everyone who has read and supported this blog over the past three and a half years.
Only one thing has made this blog possible: you. Whether you came here to learn about master data management (MDM) and data governance, or to follow the development of the consulting firm Hub Solution Designs, your support is what has kept us writing, with 265 articles to date.
We’ve had some great guest authors over the years, whose work you can see on the Top Series page. They’ve helped to bring great insights and ideas to the blog; I hope you take the time to check out their work.
Our MDM Best Practice series was very popular this October, with the series as a whole receiving more than 2,100 page views in the past two months. The shorter article on Ten Best Practices for Master Data Management, which led to the ten part series, has received 5,100 views so far.
Five Essential Elements of MDM and CDI remains one of our most popular articles, and Joan Lawson’s MDM and SOA, a Strong Partnership is in the “Top Ten” as well.
A couple of the articles we’ve written about Oracle have proven popular as well: Oracle’s MDM Strategy and Roadmap, and the First Look at Oracle Fusion MDM Hub. Jim Parnitzke’s series on Modeling the Blueprint for MDM proved so popular, we re-ran it this summer, as did Rob DuMoulin’s series on Data Profiling for All The Right Reasons.
Our article on the Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data has received 1,175 total views over the past year, and How Master Data Management is Similar to ERP has been averaging 200-300 views per year for more than three years now. MDM and Enterprise Architecture (also by Joan Lawson) is a good reminder of the central role that MDM plays in the practice of Enterprise Architecture.
I hope you enjoy reading the blog as much as I enjoy writing for you. And I hope your holiday season is filled with family, love and happiness, and that you have a safe, healthy and prosperous New Year!
Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management
Rahul Kamath from Oracle kindly did an analyst briefing recently for Hub Designs, to fill us in on the details and progress of Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management, or DRM as it’s widely called.
Rahul is the Director of Product Management at Oracle for DRM. I’ve known him for several years, since my days at D&B managing its strategic alliance with Oracle.
Oracle’s Hyperion DRM product evolved from Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, and in turn from a product called Razza that Hyperion acquired in 2005. Hyperion DRM manages and streamlines the process of synchronizing master data changes among complex hierarchical structures across enterprise systems.
It is primarily used in “financial master data management” (MDM) and “analytical MDM”. Oracle’s target customer for DRM is the largest, most complex companies.
Hyperion DRM is particularly useful when a company has to manage multiple financial systems. I talked to a potential client today that was using DRM to bring together, map and consolidate 20 different general ledger systems. They went live in May 2010, and were able to reduce the number of different GLs from 35 down to 20, which significantly streamlined their financial processes and dramatically reduced the amount of manual work involved in consolidating their results every month.
One thing that was interesting, according to Rahul, is that 40% of DRM’s customer base is in the financial services industry, with large customers such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.
Also, 30% of DRM customers have some SAP financials in their enterprise architectures.
Another big industry vertical is oil & gas, with customers such as Halliburton and Baker Hughes. This shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, as the oil & gas industry has some of the most complex reporting requirements I have ever come across in my career.
DRM can be used for more than just financial hierarchy management, too. Lockheed Martin is using it as an enterprise-wide Supplier Hub, so that all new suppliers that are onboarded are brought on through DRM.
In the high tech industry, companies like Dell, Google, NetApp, Symantec, Logitech and Xerox are all customers as well. Overall, Oracle has over 230 customers for DRM worldwide across all industries.
Oracle released a new version in May 2010 that is now browser-based and can run in-memory on the server, dramatically increasing performance. It handles Unicode and multi-byte characters, and runs in 64 bits, allowing essentially unlimited size models.
The MDM data model provides for inheritance and derived attribution, and has a strong versioning model, including “what if” analysis for potential changes.
Oracle’s customers seem to be using Hyperion DRM to react to an increasingly complex business environment, where they have to integrate and management dozens of general ledgers and other financial systems with corporate consolidation tools, business intelligence platforms, data warehouses, budgeting systems, multi-dimensional databases, allocation systems, etc.
DRM allows them to manage hierarchies, dimensions, business rules, mappings, and validations, and it enforces referential integrity across all subscribing systems and hierarchies, while maintaining historical versions for comparative reporting and analysis, and tracking all hierarchy and attribute changes with a full-featured audit log.
I understand from talking with several Oracle MDM salespeople in the field that Hyperion DRM is proving to be very popular with customers, and that there is a lot of interest in it from companies with heterogeneous IT environments as a way to “bring order to chaos”. In a way, it has been a bit of a sleeper product within Oracle’s MDM portfolio, but it looks like it’s finally being recognized as the solid piece of technology that it really is. And in Rahul Kamath, Oracle has put one of their best product managers on the job of managing its future.
Data Governance Position at Google
From time to time, Hub Designs highlights an MDM-related position as a courtesy to a friend of the firm. This position at Google involves both data governance and data integration.
People Technology and Operations Integration Analyst
This position is based in Mountain View, CA.
The area: People Technology and Operations
The People Technology and Operations function is responsible for the technology and operations underpinning Google’s People Operations function. Hubbed from 3 global locations (Mountain View, USA; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore ), this global team works to ensure the operational integrity of the company’s people processes, and partners with the engineering team to bring innovation in the way the company uses technology to attract, retain and grow Googlers worldwide. The team’s responsibility is complemented by a focus on optimizing operational processes, from problem definition and design to execution. PTO roles provide an excellent opportunity to make an impact across a range of human resources and business groups on a global basis.
The role: People Technology and Operations Integration Analyst
As an Integration Analyst, you will work with engineers and members of People Technology and Operations to help facilitate and oversee the integration of highly-sensitive and confidential data between Google’s internal systems and with external HR and financial systems. This position is an excellent opportunity to get a broad introduction to People Operations and Human Resources at Google. You will have an opportunity to learn about a variety of HR processes and to interact with different People Operations teams all over the world. In addition, you will acquire widely reusable skills in the areas of project management, process improvement, metrics, and vendor management. This may include management of other stakeholders involved such as vendors/outsourcers. Previous HR background is not a requirement.
Responsibilities:
- Serve as a liaison between stakeholders, team members and software engineers to communicate data integration needs, processes and deadlines
- Create processes to prepare data to ensure seamless integration
- Uphold Google’s strict standards of privacy to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data
- Diagnose, design and implement process improvements, including identification of problems and opportunities for enhancement of process parameters (quality, error rates, turn-around time and customer satisfaction, etc.), definition and assessment of improvement options, and execution/project management for the respective initiatives
- Perform operations, which may include highly-reliable data entry/manipulation around employee information and customer-friendly handling and resolution of inquiries, questions, and problems. Operations will also include analysis and resolution of problems and special cases as well as communication with internal HR business partners, recruiters and other stakeholders
Requirements:
- BA/BS degree preferred with a strong academic record
- Experience with ETL (extract, transform, load) tools, data transfer and scripting languages
- Human resources experience (in particular HRIS/HRMS administration operations) is a plus
- Affinity for technology, including intermediate to advanced Microsoft Excel and Word skills, Web/Internet/HTML and experience with enterprise type applications
- Exceptional attention to detail and solid time management and multi-tasking skills
- Excellent customer-service skills and a welcoming and helpful attitude
- High level of creativity, perseverance and openness to change
Informatica Progress
Misti Lusher and Ravi Shankar from Informatica were kind enough to do an analyst briefing for Hub Designs recently, to bring us up to date on what’s been happening with Informatica in the past few months.
The combination of Siperian with Informatica has exceeded their expectations so far, with MDM revenue running significantly ahead of quota and Informatica landing customers in a number of new vertical industries such as retail, healthcare, aerospace/defense, agriculture, education, and hospitality. Informatica continues to penetrate EMEA and has had its first successes in Asia Pacific and Latin America as well.
There’s also a healthy sales pipeline being built for future quarters, with the top three verticals being healthcare and life sciences, financial services and insurance, and high tech and retail. Growth is being seen all over the world, with a large percentage of the bigger sales opportunities for Informatica involving MDM, regardless of the region.
Ravi highlighted how the Informatica Master Data Management (MDM) solution is solving multidomain business problems like physician spend compliance, product mastering, high volume reference data mastering, clinical trial management, customer and channel management, and Salesforce.com enablement. He also discussed how Informatica’s other products usually fit into an MDM solution.
As the Informatica MDM product has evolved, it has remained true to its roots, and continues to offer complex hierarchy management, to be business user focused, and to allow for fast time to value. What Informatica has done, building on what Siperian had created before its acquisition, is to provide for true multidomain master data management, which allows for a much wider range of problems to be solved.
Informatica continues to increase its market share beyond the pharmaceutical vertical, and shows a strong track record of expanding its footprint within existing customers as well.
Informatica MDM Data Director has been widely used as well, with every new customer since its release in March 2009 buying it along with the MDM hub.
Informatica just finished up an 18-city MDM road show in the U.S. and Canada, and featured its MDM product prominently at Informatica World in early November. It has both a horizontal and a vertical industry marketing strategy.
Ravi previewed for us the materials for their “Customer and Channel Management Solution”, which manages hierarchies and relationships between customers, channel partners, products, and resources, in order to maximize account penetration, optimize coverage, and enable business agility and speed.
Ravi also gave us a demo of the latest version of the Informatica MDM product, with built-in dashboards using Data Director measuring data quality for individual customers and organizational customers. He also demonstrated the integration of MDM with the rest of the Informatica Platform – Power Center Business Glossary and Metadata Manager, and Informatica Data Quality.
Another impressive feature is enabling business applications, such as Salesforce.com, to be MDM aware. New records can be entered in the Salesforce.com application and instantly be bounced up directly against the Informatica MDM hub, and customer hierarchies can be viewed in a Salesforce.com tab, rather than requiring the user to jump back and forth between a Salesforce window and an Informatica MDM window. And the Salesforce user can see a timeline of a record “as of” a particular date, including all the hierarchy data.
At the end of the briefing, I came away feeling (again) that Informatica had made a great move in purchasing Siperian, and that Informatica’s MDM business has clearly gained momentum since the acquisition. This is clearly one of those cases where one plus one equals three. Informatica has done a great job integrating Siperian into the company, in taking advantage of the synergies between the two companies, and in promoting the product. Opportunities exist to take it even further, but the Informatica team is to be congratulated, since almost 60% of all mergers and acquisitions fail to create shareholder value according to the Boston Consulting Group.
Making Life Even Better (An Available MDM Position)
From time to time, Hub Designs highlights an MDM-related position as a courtesy to a friend of the firm.
Sr. Project Manager; Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA
Making Life Even Better.
Life Technologies Corporation (LIFE) is a global biotechnology tools company dedicated to improving the human condition. The company was created from the merger of Invitrogen Corporation and Applied Biosystems in November of 2008.
Life Technologies customers do their work across the biological spectrum, working to advance personalized medicine, regenerative science, molecular diagnostics, agricultural and environmental research, and 21st century forensics. LIFE’s systems, consumables and services enable researchers to accelerate scientific exploration, driving to discoveries and developments that make life even better.
With annual sales in excess of $3 billion, LIFE employs approximately 9,000 people in more than 100 countries and possesses a rapidly growing intellectual property estate of approximately 3,600 patents and exclusive licenses.
Life Technologies is a publicly traded company trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol LIFE. For more information on how we are making a difference please visit Life Technologies on the web.
Position Objective: Technical Project Manager manages and delivers IT projects. This individual is responsible for working on a team to provide direction and mentoring to project managers and project teams.
- Lead project governance activities and associated communication, executive briefings and reporting for assigned projects.
- Oversee all aspects of project scope, schedule, resource risks and overall management to ensure and drive successful delivery of assigned projects.
- Ensure deliverables/milestones in project plans are achieved within cost, schedule, scope, quality and delivery.
- Responsible for managing and overseeing the operation of assigned projects, including setting strategic priorities, conducting blueprint sessions, setting milestones, reviewing progress, reporting status, re-allocating resources, and resolving conflicts.
- Assure that the project teams are managing the system development process including systems analysis, technical design, coding, testing, turnover to production, acceptance criteria and review schedules.
- Assure that project teams are managing communications, change management, and training.
- Provide overall capital and operating expense project budget development and responsibility for assigned projects.
- Manage critical supplier and internal customer relationships.
- Maintain extensive knowledge and expertise in project management disciplines, as well as multiple business processes and/or technical areas.
- Work with other Project Managers managing technology initiatives; provide expert consulting services such as project set-up; project rescue; resource planning, demand/capacity analysis.
- Work with the PMO Team and Senior Leaders to help practice and spread project management standards, disciplines and rigor across Life Technologies.
- Provide guidance in establishing best practices in the use and integration of portfolio and project management methods and tools.
- Leverage industry best practices to plan, manage, monitor and report on all projects.
- Provide documentation of all PMO framework design and analysis work.
Skills and Credentials:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, systems analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience, and/or Master’s degree a plus
- A minimum of 7 years of hands-on SDLC IT project/project management and/or work in an enterprise IT PMO. Experience in delivery of successful ERP, Master Data Management (MDM), HR programs a plus.
- Proven ability to lead groups, manage project deliverables, and maintain client relationships-Proven ability to lead groups, manage project deliverables, and maintain client relationships
- Experience in managing budgets, project plans, resource allocations, and priorities.
- Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma Experience/Certification, FDA Computer Systems Validation, or M&A/Integration experience is a plus.
- MS Suite, Visio, expertise with Excel, Databases, querying languages
- Demonstrated skills with portfolio and project management tools
- Application of process improvement frameworks such as SEI-CMMI, Six Sigma DMAIC, ITIL, COBIT
- Demonstrated expertise with various industry PM methodologies including AGILE, SCRUM, RUP, Waterfall, PMI PMBok, other.
- Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and processing environments.
- Exceptional interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation and negotiation.
- Strong leadership skills.
- Excellent analytical and technical skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Excellent planning and organizational skills.
- Understanding of the political climate of the enterprise and how to navigate the politics.
- Ability to balance the long-term (“big picture”) and short-term implications of individual decisions.
- Ability to apply multiple solutions to business problems.
Characteristics:
- Respected as a leader
- Influential in the organization and a team player
- Active listener, open to other views and capable of seeing the many sides of the situations
- Highly supportive of the business and of its ideals and strategies.
- Effective at driving short-term actions that are consistent with long-term goals.
- Leverage industry best-practices
- Analytical Thinking/ Decision Making
- Adaptability/Interpersonal Communication
- Commitment to Results/ Team Player
- Business Acumen/ Process Management
- Managing Finances/ Budgets
- Acting with Integrity & Trust
Scope of Activities:
Provide project leadership to high impact projects involving large, multi-disciplined project teams composed of both internal IT Staff, external consulting partners, and business unit representatives.
For more information on this position, please click here, then do a keyword search for Project Manager. Choose the “Sr. Technical Project Manager” position.
Gartner Projects MDM Software Revenue to Grow 14%
Bank Systems & Technology magazine had a good article by Penny Crosman today.
Gartner Research is predicting 14% growth over 2009 levels for master data management (MDM) software license revenues, to $1.5 billion.
Business drivers for adoption range from delivering revenue, service, agility and risk management improvement, cost reduction and integration simplification. John Radcliffe, a research vice president at Gartner, said ”Today, most organizations juggle multiple sets of business and data applications across corporate, regional and local systems. At the same time, customers are demanding faster and more complex responses from organizations, leading to an inconsistency that hinders the organization’s ability to measure and move within the market. With MDM, CIOs can create a unified view of existing data, leading to greater enterprise agility, simplified integration and, ultimately, improved profitability.”
Some interesting predictions were included in the Bank Systems & Technology article:
- From 2009 through 2014, MDM software markets will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18%, from $1.3 billion to $2.9 billion.
- Gartner foresees a larger, more unified MDM software market reaching nearly $3 billion by 2014.
- By 2015, 10 percent of packaged MDM implementations will be delivered as software as a service in the public cloud (MDM today is typically implemented on-premises)
- Through 2015, 66 percent of organizations that initiate an MDM program will struggle to demonstrate the business value of MDM.
This is not because MDM can’t show sufficient business value. The Bank Systems & Technology article goes on to say “If IT departments initiate an MDM initiative, they often struggle to get the business on board and to demonstrate the business value of MDM, particularly if there are no business-process-oriented metrics and financial quantifications to define and measure success, Gartner analysts say.” (emphasis added)
At Hub Designs, like many other MDM practitioners, we’ve been saying for quite a while that the business needs to own the MDM initiative. This isn’t always a popular stance, particularly when the people bringing you into a particular client company are the IT people. But it’s the truth – if the business doesn’t own it, the business won’t feel ownership.
The article goes on to say “MDM needs to align with the business vision and strategy, and will require executive business sponsorship, strong involvement of business stakeholders and change management.”
“It’s not just an IT project. The business needs to take responsibility and be accountable for master data governance and stewardship,” says Radcliffe.
“Unless organizations take a holistic, business-driven approach to MDM, addressing governance and metrics requirements in particular, they risk having their MDM programs fail,” he says. “Internal politics won’t be brought under control without a governance framework, and without a metrics structure, there will be no way of objectively defining what success looks like and measuring whether or not it has been achieved.”
We couldn’t agree more. In our “Ten Best Practices” series this October, we specifically discussed that topic in Master Data Management Best Practice #10 – Use a Balanced, Holistic Approach, saying “This may be the most important best practice of all: use a balanced, holistic approach – addressing people, process, technology and information. Start with the people, politics and culture, and then move on to the data governance and stewardship processes, then the technology.”
The MDM initiatives that companies are taking on right now aren’t “too big to fail”, but they are too important to fail.
As a long-time MDM evangelist, who is used to describing MDM and data governance in such a way that people get excited about the change it can make for their companies, I think we need the types of economic and technological changes described in Penny Crosman’s article. Too many companies are lurching into the 21st century with the baggage of a late 90′s technology infrastructure holding them back. Faster, better decision-making, increased revenue and reduced costs, easier compliance and risk management, improved business and IT agility – these are things that aren’t going to come easily but they are worth it, and MDM and data governance are a big part of the answer for a lot of companies.
So hats off to Penny Crosman and her article in Bank Systems & Technology, and to John Radcliffe and Andrew White at Gartner Research for all the good work that they do.
