MDM Community on Ning
Today, Hub Designs committed to sponsoring the MDM Community on Ning.
Recently, Ning changed its business model from providing free social networks to charging between $19.95 per year (for educational and non-profit use) to $199.95 per year (for customized Ning Networks), all the way up to $499.95 per year (for high end social networks with integration options and more bandwidth and storage).
When I started the MDM Community back in November 2008, it was mostly a reaction to the awful state of LinkedIn Groups. Lots of spam, tons of irrelevant job postings, and very little community or sharing between MDM practitioners.
At the time, Ning was a free option, so starting the MDM Community on Ning was an easy choice. It grew gradually, and now has 295 members from 28 different countries. A lot of the different players in the MDM world are represented: Oracle (and Silver Creek Systems), IBM (and Initiate Systems), Informatica (and Siperian), D&B, Kalido, Orchestra Networks, Riversand Technologies, TIBCO (and Netrics). And a lot of large systems integration and consulting firms are represented.
Well, Ning is no longer providing its social network as a free service, but the $200 per year is a pretty reasonable investment to give MDM practitioners all over the world a vendor-neutral forum to hang out, ask questions of one another, help each other out, provide assistance, share opinions, write blog articles, update their profiles, do all of those things that people do on social networks.
At the time, there really wasn’t any other place to do all that which was ad-free, spanned all of the different flavors and vendors of MDM and data governance, and gave everyone an equal voice. I moderate the discussion forums but I try to do it with a very light hand. If anything, perhaps I should be more involved in the MDM Community and put more of my energy into growing it – and hopefully, I’ll do that now that Hub Designs has stepped up to keeping it alive on Ning.
If you haven’t already joined, please consider joining by clicking here. If you’re already a member, log in at http://mdmcommunity.ning.com/ and let us know what’s on your mind.
Why I Enjoy MDM So Much
I was reading a very good article on a blog called Presentation Zen called The Importance of Starting from Why. The article describes a TED talk by a leadership expert and author named Simon Sinek. In his talk, which I encourage you to watch yourself, he talks about the importance of understanding the “Why” of something vs. the “How” and the “What”. Since I read that article and watched that video, I’ve been thinking about why I enjoy MDM and data governance so much, and about the central premise of Simon’s talk, which is that there’s a simple pattern, that all great and inspiring leaders and organizations think, act and communicate in the same way, and it’s the exact opposite from everyone else. He calls it “the golden circle”:
Why -> How -> What, and goes on to say that this little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire, where others aren’t. Every person and organization knows what they do, most know how they do it, but a lot don’t know why. The successful ones start with the why and work “inside out” (in the opposite direction from most people and companies). By nailing down the why first, everything else falls into place.
I don’t want to reproduce his whole talk here in this article, but it got me thinking about my interest in master data management and about Hub Designs and our approach to working with our clients.
I got interested in master data in one of my first consulting projects after graduating from college. I had a client that was a distributor of VHS videotapes. People would call up and order a show on tape, and the customer service people would enter them in as new customers rather than search to see if they might be an existing customer. Their order entry system was written in FoxPro on a PC network, and I had my own consulting business doing FoxPro programming. So I was engaged to help them deduplicate their customer master, based on similarity of customer name and address. I remember at the time thinking it was a great intellectual exercise.
That was my first exposure, but hardly my last. In 1995, I got recruited into a position as a project manager for an Oracle ERP implementation, and I did many Oracle projects over the years that followed. In ERP implementations, converting master data well is a big contributor to the success of the project, and I found that handling data quality issues properly became second nature to me.
In 2001-2002, I was a program manager on a large Oracle ERP project for a $1 billion software company, and one of the areas I oversaw was Customer Registration. My client and my team were one of the first to integrate Oracle’s Trading Community Architecture (TCA) with Dun & Bradstreet’s real-time database (D&B Data Integration Toolkit). That lead to my going to work for D&B in 2004, and being part of the Global Alliances team there until 2007. While at D&B, I managed their strategic alliance with Oracle, and worked closely with Oracle on Customer Data Hub and its integration with D&B content.
I mention all this not to bore you with my professional history for the past twenty-three years, but to illustrate how a passion for master data can get into your bones, and shape your career. It’s woven itself into my life, and become part of the “Why” for Hub Designs and how we work with our clients. Anyone who knows me or has worked with Hub Designs professionally knows that we care deeply about our clients and their success. They become part of our family. We hug them when we see them. We put so much of ourselves into our clients’ projects that we form relationships that last for years.
In the video we produced for the recent Gartner MDM Summit, we used words like ‘passion’, ‘performance’, ‘teamwork’, and ‘integrity’ to describe our “why”. That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning – making a difference for our clients, helping them solve their business problems, moving the needle, making things better in their organizations, and improving things one company at a time.
In the end, why I started my own consulting firm again was so I could work with clients in my own unique way, so I could develop something of lasting value, and so I could turn my passion for MDM and data governance into a business that would make a difference to our clients.
What’s your why?
Recent eLearning Curve Webinar
Hub Designs recently hosted a 30 minute webinar on “Best Practices in MDM and Data Governance with Dan Power”, in concert with our friends at eLearning Curve and Information Management magazine.
To download the replay of the webinar (with audio), please go to http://bit.ly/hub-designs-webinar. To download just the slides, please go to http://bit.ly/mdm-best-practices and click “Download”.
For the “When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic” white paper mentioned in the presentation, go to http://bit.ly/data-governance. Scroll to and click the link at the end of that article.
Thanks for attending the webinar (or the replay). We hope you found it valuable!
When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic
How Data Governance Police Can Constrain the Value of Your Multidomain Master Data Management Initiative
(this appeared as a guest post on Informatica’s blog on Friday, April 30 2010)
I published a white paper last year, entitled “When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic,” that looked at how reactive data governance was preventing organizations from realizing the full value of master data management (MDM). By “reactive”, I mean organizations using a “coexistence” architecture where front office applications (CRM) and back office applications (ERP) are still used to author master data (customer and product data, suppliers, employees, etc.). Because these applications remain the “Systems of Entry” while the MDM hub’s role is limited to being the “System of Record,” some of the biggest promises of MDM remain unfulfilled.
So, what exactly would proactive data governance look like? Essentially, the proactive model places more emphasis on business users being the owners of the master data. Rather than letting data stewards carry the burden of the central issues of accuracy and completeness, the accountability for these goals shifts towards the business users. Since end users are empowered to enter new master data directly into the hub, their trust in the accuracy and completeness of master data goes up, plus there’s less need for data stewards to act as the “data quality police.” Once users are no longer dependent on the CRM and ERP systems to perform initial entry and updating of master data, the data stewards can focus on managing exceptions and measuring data for quality, availability, security and usefulness. In this less-intrusive role, data stewards don’t present a bottleneck to critical business processes such as order management or invoicing.
By getting the master data right at the source, your initial level of quality for new records is much higher. The proactive style of data governance also effectively eliminates any time lags between the initial entry of a new master record, and its certification and publishing via middleware to the rest of the enterprise. As such, marketing campaigns can be done more quickly, with no upfront data remediation needed prior to launching a campaign. Finance benefits as well, since all of the data elements needed for a new customer are captured at once, and the hub-based process for adding a new customer can include pulling third-party content and calculating a credit limit, then passing that information back to the ERP system. Customer service benefits too, because all information is stored in one hub and made accessible through an efficient, user-friendly front end. Customer service reps are able to access all of the data needed for each customer interaction, as well as being able to author new data when necessary.
When is the right time to transition from reactive to proactive data governance? Some situations call for starting out immediately with the proactive approach, such as when you’ve got multiple CRM systems and ERP systems that would require integration with the hub in order to allow them to continue to operate as Systems of Entry, or when your current source systems are very brittle or hard to maintain or modify. In those cases, bite the bullet and plan from the beginning for proactive data governance.
Want to learn more about the reactive vs. proactive governance? You can download the complete whitepaper “When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic” here.
Upcoming Hub Designs Webinar
Hub Designs is hosting a complimentary webinar on “Best Practices in MDM and Data Governance with Dan Power” in concert with our friends at eLearning Curve and Information Management magazine.
The webinar will be held on Friday, May 21, 2010, at 12:00 pm EDT (9:00 am PDT).
Topics will include:
- helping you better understand master data management (MDM) and data governance,
- presenting ten best practices and four advanced topics,
- covering what works and what doesn’t,
- the importance of a holistic approach,
- how to get the political aspects right.
We’ll also discuss the difference between proactive and reactive data governance, and a potential MDM hub architecture.
To register, go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/733157689. If you have any questions you’d like us to address, you can ask them here before the webinar using the Comment feature.
Our Booth at the Gartner MDM Summit
Hub Designs was a Silver sponsor at the Gartner MDM Summit 2010. Here’s the new, 3-minute video we produced to describe what Hub Designs does as an consulting firm focused specifically on MDM:
Great New White Paper and Other Collateral Available at Our Booth
At the event, we announced with Equifax a new product that integrates Equifax commercial information with Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Customer Data Hub. This product simplifies the process of integrating Equifax credit and marketing information with prospect and customer data in Oracle. Both the joint press release and a one-page product overview were distributed at the booth.
Also available was a new whitepaper written in collaboration with Informatica titled, When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic: How Data Governance Police Can Constrain the Value of Your Multidomain Master Data Management Initiative. This updated version of an earlier white paper written with Siperian in 2009 added both new content and industry insights. It was very well received at the Gartner conference this week.
Finally, we handed out one of the most popular recent articles from this blog, Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data.
The conference drew attendees from many different market sectors, so discussions and meetings were both informative and valuable from an MDM perspective. Several Hub Designs clients were able to join us there, from the insurance, software and transportation industries, and we had four of our team members there as well. I’m going to write a separate article with my thoughts on the sessions and the mood of the conference, but I wanted to provide a look at our booth as well, for our readers who weren’t able to make it to Las Vegas this week.
Hub Designs and Equifax Introduce Oracle Integration Solution
Today, at the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Las Vegas, Hub Designs and Equifax jointly announced a new product, Hub Designs Equifax Integration for Oracle, bringing the power of Equifax Commercial Information Solutions data to the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Customer Data Hub platforms.
The solution smoothly integrates Equifax data into Release 12 of Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and master data management (MDM) suites.
Hub Designs Equifax Integration for Oracle provides access to vital credit and marketing data in Oracle’s MDM and ERP modules including:
- Oracle Customers Online
- Oracle Sales Online
- Oracle Receivables
Equifax commercial information helps businesses to:
- Make credit decisions, expedite collections, reduce bad debt and pre-qualify prospects;
- Reveal linkage between related companies;
- Standardize name & address information and prevent duplicates;
- Enrich prospect and customer records with marketing and credit information from Equifax;
- Increase productivity by creating new parties and party relationships in Oracle automatically
The joint press release describes the solution in more detail, and a one-page overview is available as well. If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us via our web site or drop by Booth #7 during the exhibit hall hours at the Gartner MDM Summit.
Informatica Analyst Briefing
Arvind Parthasarathi, Ken Hoang and Ravi Shankar from Informatica were kind enough recently to give me a detailed briefing on Informatica’s master data management (MDM) strategy after its acquisition of Siperian.
First, there’s no doubt this was a game-changing move, for both Siperian and for Informatica. With over 4,000 Informatica installed base customers to leverage, and 200 Informatica sales reps going through training and certification, Siperian’s sales momentum should increase dramatically. And in fact, several new deals have closed just since the acquisition was announced in late January.
And being acquired by Informatica eliminates the “company viability” question that some Fortune 500 IT shops would have about any software company under a certain size (not just Siperian). Informatica itself might be acquired by one of the mega-vendors at some point, but with annual revenue of $500 million, it’s big enough not to be subject to the financial viability question.
Informatica also provides a large partner ecosystem and a significant marketing budget, so living on under the Informatica banner, Siperian can compete more readily for mind share both with partners and with potential customers.
But what impressed me the most was the strategic nature of the other purchases that Informatica has made over the past couple of years, such as Identity Systems for entity resolution (i.e. matching) and Address Doctor for address cleansing. With the addition of Siperian as a strong player in the multidomain MDM hub space, Informatica has declared itself a real competitor against the likes of Oracle, IBM, Initiate Systems (an IBM company) and SAP.
And in some ways, Informatica is better positioned than most of these, for two reasons. First, it has a complete suite of leading products for data integration, data quality and all of the associated things that make up the “MDM ecosystem”. And second, many of its competitors are dependent on it for those components (Ramon Chen wrote a great article on Informatica’s OEM agreements with various competitors).
Informatica’s product lineup supports all of these MDM requirements:
- Multiple MDM architectural styles including the ability to support Registry style (competes most directly with Initiate Systems)
- Multiple data domains, i.e. multidomain MDM (competes most directly with Oracle, IBM and SAP)
- Data Integration and Data Quality as a foundation for MDM (competes with a wide variety of products)
So in some ways, Informatica wins even if customers buy a competitor’s MDM hub product, because there’s a good chance they’ll still buy Informatica’s data integration and/or data quality solutions, to help them with data integration, data profiling and data quality, or to help build the inevitable data services, once the master data is gathered in a centralized hub and able to deliver timely, trusted and relevant to the rest of the enterprise.
Informatica sees its MDM products used in both Operational MDM (where the master data is actively managed by data stewards, governed and improved and then synchronized back to the operational systems), and in Analytical MDM (where for various reasons, the improved master data does not flow back to the operational systems, but flow instead to data warehousing, analytical and business intelligence applications).
Informatica has such a strong, integrated story, with its PowerCenter data integration, Informatica Data Quality, and Informatica MDM products, that it’s able to accommodate customers’ maturity needs starting with data integration and progressing to data quality and MDM.
And Informatica, by giving customers the ability to solve any MDM-related business problem with a unified architecture, spanning data integration, data profiling, data quality, identity resolution, address validation, and all major styles of master data management, has pulled together a great set of solutions for MDM.
I’m looking forward to seeing the Informatica folks at this week’s Gartner MDM Summit conference in Las Vegas. If you’re going to be there, stop by and see the Hub Designs team at Booth #7 during the exhibit hall hours. We’ll be announcing a new product with Equifax, and we’ll be releasing a data governance white paper with Informatica.
Hub Designs at Gartner MDM Summit
We’re in the final stages of getting ready for the Gartner MDM Summit at this point. It will be held on April 14-16, 2010 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, NV.
This will be our third time at this event, and our second as an exhibitor. Last October, we exhibited as a Kiosk sponsor, and this year we will be there as a Silver sponsor. We’ll be in Booth 7 during the exhibit hall hours, and if you’re going to be attending and would like to meet with us, just contact us via our web site.
We’ll be announcing an exciting new product, and publishing a new version of one of our most popular white papers.
Here’s what you’ll learn about if you go:
- Multi-domain MDM
- MDM vision and strategy
- Customer data
- Product data
- Data warehousing, data quality and MDM
- Enterprise information architecture
- Enterprise information management
- SOA and MDM
And here are the key benefits of attending:
- Insight into creating a successful MDM program
- Persuading the business to take a leadership role
- Delivering measurable ROI by linking your MDM to business metrics
- Reducing costs and increasing efficiency by removing duplication and creating consistency
- Improving customer acquisition and cross- selling/upselling activities
- Complying with regulations and leveraging your master data to manage risk
- Consolidating and leveraging data faster following mergers & acquisitions
- Accelerating your new product introductions
- Managing your supply chain more efficiently
It’s not too late to register at the special rate of $1,795 – a $300 savings on the standard rate of $2,095! Go to gartner.com/us/mdm or call 1-866-405-2511 and mention priority code: MDMHUB.
We’d love to see you in Las Vegas! These events are like “old home week” – getting to catch up with people we haven’t seen in a while and find out what everyone in the MDM space is up to. So come along for the ride, catch a few sessions, maybe hit the tables a bit, and head home with a little less cash in your pockets but a little more knowledge in your head. And if you need help convincing the “powers that be” to let you go to the conference, Gartner has very thoughtfully put together an Attendee Justification Kit to help you convince them.
Confessions of a Social Networker
I’ve been writing for Information Management magazine for two years now, and my latest column “Confessions of an Active Social Networker” is available at http://www.information-management.com/issues/20_2/confessions-of-an-active-social-networker-10017314-1.html.
It tells the story of how I’ve used blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in my professional life over the past few years, and gives some tips on how people can apply some of those ideas in their careers.
Building your personal brand, whether it be in master data management and data governance, or in any other area of business or technology, is a matter of knowing your stuff, and letting other people get to know you and your voice. Having something to say in a distinctive way, adding some value, taking a stand, being a good source of information, being entertaining, being concise – all those things are helpful.
Today, there are so many sources of information – all literally at our fingertips. People are looking for someone that can help them cut to the chase – assess new technology, help them learn something new quickly, understand different schools of thought on complex topics, synthesize and present ideas from both business and technology to both management and technical audiences.
If you can do that, you’ll attract an audience. Small at first, of course. But a blog, a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter and Facebook account, perhaps a YouTube channel – these cost almost nothing but your time. But the time you invest will pay tremendous dividends down the road. Not overnight, of course. And perhaps not in cash deposited to your bank account. But in credibility, in relationships, in marketing exposure, in reinforcing your message, in personal branding, in networking – the effects are undeniable.
I still meet people and companies who shrug social media off or who just “don’t get” blogging. Corporations who are passing up an incredibly valuable and cost effective way to engage in dialog with their customers and potential customers. People who have a wealth of knowledge to share but don’t take the time. So much untapped potential in the world. But I see the growth figures mentioned in the article in Information Management, and I think people are starting to catch on. Our corporate blog gets three times the traffic as our web site. And we’ve had clients hire us specifically because they’ve read a number of the articles on the blog and have told us “we can tell that you know your stuff”.
So if anyone challenges you on the ROI of blogging or social media, send them to me – I’ve got a few good anecdotes I can tell them.
2009 Year in Review
As we’re about to enter 2010, it’s a good time to reflect on what happened in 2009 and what it all means.
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” So Dickens begins “A Tale of Two Cities”, but it’s also a good description of the past year.
The first half of the year was one of the most challenging I’ve faced in my twenty-three year career in business and technology. The second half of 2009 was better – not without its speed bumps but every month was a little better than the one before it.
The macro-economic climate has been tumultuous at best. But the second half of the year showed enough improvement that Hub Designs’ revenue for the year was up 33%. Not bad for a two and a half year old company during the worst economic conditions in 80 years …
Marketing and Thought Leadership
We launched a new web site in January, and it’s been well received. Total visits to www.hubdesigns.com were up 14% over 2008.
A little later in the year, we updated the “look and feel” of the Hub Designs Blog, branding it as the “world’s fastest growing blog covering master data management and data governance”. We’ve gotten more than 43,000 hits since we started writing in July 2007, and our readership more than doubled in 2009, to about 27,000 hits per year.
We published six issues of our “Best Practices in Master Data Management” newsletter this year. We publish the newsletter about six times a year to roughly 3,300 subscribers.
I wrote six articles for Information Management magazine, including some popular ones on “Product Information Management Challenges”, how to build a business case for master data management, and how to select the right MDM vendor for your organization. I also wrote for Identity Resolution Daily, on “The Growing Role of Identity Resolution in MDM” and “Matching – MDM’s Secret Sauce”.
With our partner Siperian, we wrote a white paper in August called “When Data Governance Turns Bureaucratic: How Data Governance Police Can Constrain the Value of Your MDM Initiative” that has generated quite a bit of discussion. You can download a copy of it here.
A second white paper, called “Best Practices for Leveraging D&B in Oracle E-Business Suite”, was written in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet. It describes using D&B information to drive better supply chain performance for companies using Oracle E-Business Suite. You can download it here.
I volunteer for the Education Committee of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG). A big part of that effort lies in programming the MDM track for the annual conference. This year, it was in Orlando in May, and I really enjoyed speaking there and seeing people from the Oracle community that I don’t see very often. Here’s a link to my OAUG presentation.
We participated in conference calls with Oracle Development during the year, and ultimately attended the Oracle Fusion “Hands-On Validation & Testing” session for Customer MDM at Oracle headquarters in August. It was a great chance to get some early insights into Oracle’s next major product release and to see the progress Oracle has made in building out its Fusion MDM vision, which is striking in its powerful hub technology and its elegant & productive user interface.
In 2008, we attended the Gartner MDM Summit to decide whether to exhibit there in 2009. We were impressed enough with the conference that we did exhibit in 2009, in October in Los Angeles. We had a positive experience, so we’ll be a Silver level sponsor in April 2010 in Las Vegas. Since we specialize in MDM and data governance, we find the association with Gartner’s MDM event a powerful one.
I didn’t attend Oracle OpenWorld for the past couple of years, but this year I was glad I did. It was like “old home week”, seeing people from Oracle itself and from the broader Oracle community that I’ve met over the past 15 years. David Butler, Senior Director of MDM Marketing at Oracle, posted my presentation on Oracle’s web site, and said “you were our cleanup hitter and you hit a home run with the bases loaded”.
We also did webinars with our partners Siperian and Initiate Systems. The Siperian webinar covered the differences between MDM platforms like Siperian and ERP platforms like SAP from a master data perspective. The Initiate webinar, with Initiate’s CTO Marty Moseley, discussed developing strong MDM business case, deploying core MDM technologies and lessons learned on the “build vs. buy” question.
Social Networking
After experimenting with social networking in 2008, this year we had a coordinated strategy to use the Hub Designs Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to communicate & collaborate with our clients, potential clients, team members, partners, suppliers, etc.
It’s a pretty simple strategy. Short updates (140 characters or less) go out on Twitter, and are re-published on both LinkedIn and Facebook. Longer updates (i.e. blog articles) are published on the Hub Designs Blog. We encourage responses and feedback using @replies on Twitter and comments on LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as longer-form comments on the blog. And we get them – almost every blog article gets at least one comment, sometimes as many as a dozen.
When a new blog article comes out, we notify everyone via a single update on Twitter. What’s amazing is that during 2009, social networking now drives about 15% of the Hub Designs Blog’s total traffic. And one of our clients gave us some good feedback that our social networking activities help her stay current on what we’re up to, and help her feel connected to us as a company.
Another social networking experiment that developed further in 2009 was the MDM Community. We started this using Ning (a “social network in a box”) in November 2008, out of frustration with LinkedIn’s “Group” functionality. It now has more than 210 members, from 23 different countries. It’s still a work in progress, but if you’re interested in master data management or data governance, you should check it out at http://mdmcommunity.ning.com. It’s becoming an international “who’s who” of the MDM world.
Summary of Client Projects
In case you think the Hub Designs team has been doing nothing but marketing, writing white papers and magazine articles, speaking at conferences, and volunteering for user groups, here’s a summary of our 2009 client projects:
- Technology provider for vehicle dealers: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite with D&B data
- Payroll services company: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite with external credit information
- Information services company: technical support for customers using Oracle E-Business Suite
- Legal information services company: readiness assessment and product MDM strategy & design
- Simulation and engineering software company: advisor to data governance board
- Manufacturer of oil and gas equipment: integration of Oracle E-Business Suite R12 with D&B
- Software company: built connector between Oracle AR and D&B’s DNBi risk management solution
- Technology company: customer MDM strategy workshop
Out With The Old, In With The New
This past year has been a lot of fun, but it has also been somewhat exhausting. So I’m looking forward to a bit more deliberate pace in 2010.
We’re very excited about the coming year at Hub Designs. We’ve got some great projects underway and in the pipeline, and we’ll be continuing to grow and expand to meet our clients’ needs and market demands.
In closing, I’d like to say how grateful I am to my family, for their patience with my traveling so much and for their unconditional love.
With Gratitude
I’ve been getting a number of “Happy Thanksgiving” e-mails today, and they’re very nice. But they’ve prompted me to think about all of the things I have that I need to grateful for, as this year starts to winds to a close.
First, my family. It’s hard having an entrepreneur as a husband and father. I have spent more time this year in hotel rooms and clients’ offices than at home, and for that I’m sorry. Hopefully the new year will see me spending more time in the Boston area than on the road, and being more present in all of your lives. And I’m hoping the sacrifices we’ve all made in building this business will continue to pay dividends in 2010 and beyond.
Second, our clients. They’ve been great this year. As usual, I won’t name names here. But you know who you are, and you know how grateful we are that you are working with us. We try to work hard for you and to always make your projects a success, but we recognize that you’re right there with us, working hard and investing yourselves in our success.
Third, our people and team members. It is a privilege to work with you. Every day, I learn something from you. Some of the best times in my professional career have been this year (some of the hardest too!). But I always learned something, and I thank you for taking the time to teach me. It is always interesting.
Lastly, to everyone who reads our web site, this blog, our newsletter, our magazine articles, who caught one of our speaking engagements this year, or who joined the MDM Community – thank you! The extended community that Hub Designs is part of is very special to me. People that I run into at conferences, or that send me e-mails offering to connect me with people they know, or that reach out to me through LinkedIn, or that read my postings on Twitter, are all very important to me.
A few years ago, before I really knew the value of social networking, I didn’t understand it and thought it was a little frivolous. Now, I understand its power – to connect us to one another, to effect change, to weave people and companies together in a new way, to make the 21st century more intimate, to allow me to sit in my office and say thank you to thousands of people at once, without blasting a newsletter into people’s inboxes, without sending out a mailing, without placing an ad, without doing any of the traditional things companies would have done at one time to get their message across (and are still doing).
Today, to me, it’s all about authenticity, and helping people, and being in the right place at the right time. And for that, I’m grateful.
D&D Computers One, Best Buy Zero
I had a laptop “near death experience” over the past few days. It actually started on Saturday (which was Halloween). So I guess that makes this a “Halloween Hard Drive Horror Show”.
First, my Sony Vaio, which I’ve had for two years, got a little wobbly. Windows Vista wanted to run the dreaded CHKDSK utility. Things went down hill from there very quickly.
Monday night, I went back to my hotel room after working at my client’s offices all day, and the laptop refused to boot up at all. I gave it my best “I am not a techie” try, and realized this was not something I was going to be able to resolve on my own. No problem, I thought. I bought this laptop at Best Buy and was smart enough (I thought) to purchase a three-year extended warranty at the time (for an additional $600).
So yesterday morning, I showed up when the local Best Buy opened their doors, with my service plan number in hand. After a brief wait, I spoke with a member of the Geek Squad. He regretted to inform me that neither hard drive failure or reinstalling Windows Vista were covered by my extended warranty. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their Yellow Pages.
I got really lucky finding D&D Computers in Huber Heights, Ohio.
Brian Dean, the Chief Tech, told me to come right over. I got there a little after 11:00 am, and was there until just after 4:00 pm. Brian took extremely good care of me and my laptop. At my request, he replaced my failing 150 GB hard drive with a brand new 500 GB drive, bumped my RAM up from 2 GB to 4 GB, and installed Windows 7 on the new drive.
I had to reinstall all of my applications, which took a few hours last night. But to be back up and running in less than 24 hours, and to have gotten a major laptop upgrade out of all this, was a great outcome. I even got my old hard drive installed in a little enclosure so I could hook it up to my laptop using a USB cable, to access all of my data.
The total cost was $885 ($321 at Staples for the full version of Windows 7 Professional, $500 at D&D Computers for the new hard drive, new RAM and their labor, and $64 at Best Buy for the USB drive enclosure).
The moral of the story: read the fine print of your extended warranty, let your fingers do the walking and make sure you’re current on backing up your hard drive!
Oracle OpenWorld 2009
I just arrived in lovely San Francisco for the latest edition of Oracle OpenWorld.
I’m particularly interested in the Master Data Management (MDM) track this year, as it looks as if the Oracle team has done a great job putting together a roster of Oracle employees, customers and partners to speak on its MDM products for managing master data on customers, products, financials, sites and suppliers.
I ran into several Oracle people like Pascal Laik, David Butler, and Rahul Kamath at last week’s Gartner MDM Summit conference in Los Angeles (more on that later), and as always, it was great to see them.
I’m really looking forward to this week’s sessions on the state of the art in MDM and data governance, and will be speaking myself on Thursday, Oct. 15th at 3:00 pm PDT. So if you’re interested in MDM and you’re attending OpenWorld this week, please stop by and say hello.
For that matter, if you’re in San Francisco and want to get together, send me an e-mail at powerd (at) hubdesigns (dot) com, or call my office number (781-749-8910) – it’s forwarded to my cell phone.
Hope to run into you in the City by the Bay!
Webinar with Initiate Systems
“Master Data Management: The Sliding Scale Between Build and Buy”
Replay of the webinar with Dan Power and Marty Moseley
Please join industry experts Dan Power, Founder and President, Hub Solutions, and Marty Moseley, CTO, Initiate Systems, for this webinar where we’ll outline the best practices that have evolved to support organizations in making the critical “build vs. buy” decision.
Master data management (MDM) transforms data integration and business processes. Many organizations are exploring an MDM solution and will eventually have to answer the build vs. buy question. The combination of build and buy for MDM depends on the individual organization’s circumstances, goals and objectives. As MDM has evolved, so have the best practices for considering how much should be built and how much should be bought.
Some key considerations include:
- What are your current data volumes? How will they change in the near and distant future?
- Are customer relationships one-dimensional? Are you concerned with multiple domains of data and managing the corresponding hierarchies?
- Will you implement Web services? How will they be used?
- Do you augment your internal data with information from external vendors?
- What are the time, budget and resource limitations?
- Is MDM intended to eventually provide an enterprise data platform?
Please click here for the on-demand replay.
Announcing HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hub Designs and Caliber Services Announce HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B
BOSTON, 9-MARCH-2009: Hub Solution Designs and Caliber Services have teamed up to offer HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B, enabling access to global D&B data from the Oracle E-Business Suite. This removes the complexity from integrating D&B with Oracle and offers a cost-effective way to access D&B data in real-time from Oracle’s popular applications suite.
Dan Power, president of Hub Solution Designs, stated, “Accessing D&B information on over 140 million businesses globally allows organizations to increase the speed and accuracy of their decision making, while reducing their process costs and decreasing risk.”
With today’s fast-changing economic climate and the rapid pace of mergers & acquisitions, credit and marketing decisions have to be made quickly and accurately. Getting real-time information on prospects, customers and trading partners, in your backyard or around the world, is difficult. Integrating that data with Oracle applications can be challenging too.
Robin Walker, managing partner of Caliber Services, noted “Companies are looking for rapid time-to-value. HubCaliber Real-Time Access to D&B literally allows companies to be up and running, and pulling D&B information into their Oracle E-Business Suite environment, in a few minutes.”
About Hub Solution Designs, Inc.
Hub Solution Designs, Inc. is a management & technology consulting firm which specializes in developing and executing high impact Master Data Management and Data Governance strategies. For more information, please visit www.hubdesigns.com or blog.hubdesigns.com.
About Caliber Services, LLC
Caliber Services, LLC is a consulting company focused on Oracle Applications with a specialty in the Credit-to-Cash process, including expertise in Credit Management, Advanced Collections, and Promotions Management. For more information, please visit www.caliber-services.com.
###
Contact(s):
Dan Power
Hub Solution Designs, Inc.
+1 (781) 749-8910
powerd@hubdesigns.com
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!
Subscribe via RSS
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I wanted to let you know that the easiest way to stay current with the Hub Designs blog is via Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
Under the “About” section on the left, click on the RSS icon or the “Subscribe to our feed” link. Then, in the top right corner of the page, click on your preferred news reader. You can also get the feed delivered via e-mail.
By subscribing via RSS, you’ll receive updates as soon as they’re published, and you’ll be able to mark the articles that you’ve already read, so you can focus just on the ones you haven’t read.
Of course, we’re very happy whether you choose to read the blog via http://blog.hubdesigns.com or via an RSS reader. But I did want to make sure you knew that the option was available.
To Our Readers – Thank You and Happy Holidays!
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A sincere “thank you” to everyone who reads this blog. We just had our best day, week and month ever – all on the same day, thanks to you.
Happy Holidays to everyone, and have a prosperous and healthy New Year!
Maureen Butler Joins Team; Brings Extensive SAP Expertise
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I’m very pleased to announce that Maureen Butler is joining us as a Senior Consultant. She brings significant SAP information management, marketing, supply chain, organizational design and change management expertise to the team.
Prior to joining the firm, she was Director, Customer Information Management for a Fortune 500 company, W.W. Grainger, Inc., where she led a team of 35 people in cleansing & migrating customer data into an enterprise-wide SAP system. She also developed the Data Governance and Quality programs, and implemented Grainger’s Center of Excellence for Customer Information.
By launching a cross-functional Master Data Management initiative at W.W. Grainger to improve data quality and usability, she helped drive significant revenue growth, cost savings, and process improvements for customer acquisition and penetration.
Ms. Butler has more than seventeen years of strategic leadership experience in integrated market planning and communications, customer brand strategy, organizational design, change management, product management, and supply chain with companies such as W.W. Grainger, Inc., National Education Training Group, and Educational Resources.
She is a Six Sigma Champion and a graduate of Grainger’s Leadership Development Program. She received an MBA from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, and a business marketing degree from Loyola University Chicago. Ms. Butler is located in Palatine, Illinois.
In line with our article yesterday on our MDM partnership strategy, Maureen will help us to establish and grow our partnership with SAP.
New Hub Solution Designs Web Site Launched
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We’ve just launched a completely redesigned web site for Hub Solution Designs, Inc..
We evaluated several hosted website building tools, and ended up selecting SiteKreator. It had the right blend of features & functionality, and included reasonably priced site hosting in addition to an easy-to-use web site development tool.
We started redesigning the site on 01/03/08, and launched the new site today, 02/01/08.
Huge sigh of relief – it’s done, and we can move on to other things. Many thanks to Gaurav and Tim for their help in developing content and reviewing the new pages.
There are still some improvements we’d like to make, but the basic site is up, and we can add those improvements as we go.
Please let us know what you think …
Master Data Management in the New Year
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There’s a lot going on in the Hub Solution Designs and MDM world since we ticked over to a new year on the calendar:
- We’ve got an article coming out in the March issue of DM Review
- We’ve helped finalize the agenda for the MDM track at the upcoming Oracle Applications User Group Collaborate 2008 conference
- We’re working with a great client in the upper Mid-West
- We’re in the midst of re-designing our web site on a new platform
- We’re pursuing about 14 potential new projects at various stages of the sales process
- We’re involved in a large proposal effort with another consulting firm
So it’s been pretty busy over the past couple of weeks. One way to tell when we’re in “heads down” mode for a time is when the new blog entries start becoming further apart. We’ll try to do better in the new year of writing more short entries, rather than a few, widely spaced long articles.
Hub Solution Designs continues to be very optimistic and positive on the Master Data Management space. Yes, there is some vendor hype going on (when isn’t there?). But underlying that are a large number of real client problems for which MDM is a good way to solve the business issues and drive ROI. Sometimes alone, sometimes in concert with something else like a BI solution or a Risk Management solution.
So even though we are still, in some ways, in the “early adopter” phase of the overall MDM market, it’s starting to heat up very nicely. We continue to get contacted via a variety of different channels by people looking for help with their strategic MDM initiatives. The phone’s not ringing off the wall, but the number of projects we’re getting contacted about is very healthy and it’s consistent with where we were hoping we’d be at this stage of the development of the company.
So we hope your New Year is off to a great start. Please let us know via comments to our posts how your real world MDM initiatives are doing or what your perspectives are on this space.
Tim, Gaurav and Eric
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I realized over the weekend that I haven’t written at all about my Hub Designs colleagues, Tim O’Sullivan, Gaurav Arora and Eric Gustafson.
I’ve known Tim O’Sullivan for more than five years. We met through a playgroup that his son Aidan and my son Conor were both part of. He’s got a great Irish accent, tons of technology experience, and the heart of an entrepreneur.
I met with Tim over the summer, once I knew I’d be leaving D&B and starting my own consulting firm. We got together at the South Hingham Starbucks (Tim loves Starbucks, I’m more of a Dunkin’ Donuts guy myself) to talk about his career options. I started telling him about the company I was forming and about Master Data Management. We quickly realized two things: Tim had a lot of background in this stuff, and he was very interested in getting involved in the company. So it was a total “no brainer” to offer him a role in the company, and his contributions since then have been fantastic.
Gaurav and I go back ten years to our days in CSC Consulting’s Oracle practice. We worked together on a number of Oracle projects, and when I left CSC to go to eCredit, I recruited him to go there too . I also helped him get a position at Cognos as Director, CRM, where he was at the heart of their Customer Data Hub implementation.
Since I’ve known Gaurav for such a long time, I have complete confidence in his technical, project management and consulting capabilities. This is a guy who works hard and gets the job done (which is always good!). He’s also very smart and entrepreneurial himself. So I reached out to him via e-mail at the end of August. It turns out he’s been in India for the past year or so. So his joining Hub Solution Designs means we can have an Indian presence much more quickly, and he also brings so much experience to the table, that offering him a role in the company was also a “no brainer”.
Eric approached me through a friend at D&B. He’s been retired from D&B for a couple of years but is still interested in doing some consulting. I spent about an hour on the phone with him and quickly realized that he too had some fantastic experience and would be a great addition to the team.
He’s the author/inventor of a U.S. patent on MatchGrade, a system for measuring the quality of entity matching, and has over twenty five years of experience in integration technology, alliances, marketing and strategy, working with companies like 3M, AT&T, Cargill, Dell, DHL, FedEx, HP, IBM, Office Depot, Oracle, UPS, Wal-Mart and Xerox. So I was very happy to invite Eric to be a senior consultant on the Hub Solution Designs team.
More than any other business, consulting is about people. They literally are your inventory and your most important corporate asset. The skills, experience and relationships they bring are crucial, and as a small firm, our people are our best competitive differentiator against the bigger, more established consulting firms out there. We have a team that brings almost 100 years of experience to the table, and we can use that experience to help our clients achieve success in their Master Data Management and Customer Data Integration initiatives.
It feels great to have a team like that behind me …
Launching the Company
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Well, this week we formally launched the company.
On Sunday, I started by sending the launch announcement / press release to 425 former colleagues at D&B. I got a lot of very nice e-mails from people saying congratulations, and a few interesting calls from some of the sales people I used to work closely with, who had customers that may need our help.
On Monday, I sent the announcement to another 1,000 people from my address book, and I’ve gotten some good feedback from that too. I was worried that I’d be flagged as a “spammer”, so I haven’t sent the other 1,800 or so e-mails yet. But I don’t know any other way to efficiently get the word out to so many people at once …
So please, if you’ve gotten an e-mail from me in the last few days that you weren’t expecting or didn’t want, please accept my sincere apology.
One of my former clients called today offering to be a reference for me, which was very nice. And a retired D&B person who’s interested in doing some consulting work with us called me today as well, and it looks like he’ll be joining the firm as one of our consultants. I should have him listed on the web site at www.hubdesigns.com/about by tomorrow.
As you might expect, there were some good spikes in visits to both this blog and to the web site.
And it looks like we’ll be starting our first client engagement within the next week or two.
So it feels a bit like the first 30 seconds of a rocket ride (not that I know what that really feels like!) – very exciting, a lot going on at once, tons of phone calls and e-mails coming in, long but satisfying days.
In short, everything I was hoping it would be. Being an entrepreneur is great! Plenty of hard work and some real struggles, but the good moments are truly awesome.
My thanks to everyone who has called or e-mailed with their kind words of encouragement. Your friendship is very valuable to me.
Best regards — Dan
Getting Some Infrastructure in Place
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The last week has been very busy with some basic things that just had to be done.
First on the list was incorporating. I used a local attorney with an excellent reputation who happens to be a neighbor of mine. It was a pretty straightforward process. I can’t say I enjoyed it exactly, but he made it pretty painless for me. He also submitted my application for a Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN).
I bought a new laptop, a Sony Vaio SZ-650N/C. It’s very light (less than 4 pounds), with a powerful CPU, lots of RAM and disk space, and a powerful graphics card. Pretty much the same formula I followed the last time I bought a computer (in 2004). That was a Sony desktop and it’s still going strong.
But then I had to install Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, get my Palm Treo synchronizing with Outlook, get Groove synchronizing all my data between the desktop and the new laptop, fix a thousand small preferences on the laptop (did I mention I could only get it with Vista?), and sign up for Salesforce.com.
So it took about a week of futzing with Vista, trying to figure out why Outlook and the Treo initially wouldn’t talk to each other, why Groove 2007 wouldn’t talk to Groove v3.1, getting Zone Alarm (my preferred firewall/anti-virus/anti-spam suite) installed and working right, and removing a few pieces of “bloatware” that Sony, in its infinite wisdom, included on the laptop.
But now it’s all working, and I think I’m going to be back to my usual level of productivity. With Groove, anything I do on one machine is immediately backed up to the other machine’s hard drive, and I can invite co-workers or clients into the workspaces for secure document sharing. With the Treo, all of my contacts, calendar items and notes are always in the palm of my hand. And with Salesforce.com (although I’m not a wiz at it by any means), I’ll be able to share my prospects, contacts and activities with the other two members of the firm.
I feel like I’m getting the other half of my brain back.
Getting to Revenue
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Well, Hub Solution Designs started its first actual client engagement today. Obviously, I can’t say who the client is here, but it’s a Massachusetts company that was looking for some help understanding and implementing the Trading Community Architecture in Oracle E-Business Suite, the same technology in Oracle’s CDI platform (Customer Data Hub).
We had a great meeting to kick off the project and spent most of the time creating a detailed project plan. Specifically, they’ll be addressing some general data quality issues like de-duplication, and also creating a “Party Split” program that will take parties in the Oracle TCA registry and split them out into separate parties in their own right, provided certain business rules are met.
It felt very good to be out in the field again. Both Tim O’Sullivan and myself went to today’s kick-off. Going forward, hopefully there will be some areas of the project that Tim can do and some that they’ll need me on.
Company-building, web site design, incorporation and all the other startup stuff is fun, but being out at a client site and having a positive impact on their company is a big kick, and I didn’t realize until today how much I’ve missed it in the last three years.
I’m going to do another post shortly where I start a list of useful definitions for Master Data Management, based on an article I wrote earlier this year in DM Review.
Musings …
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I tend to write my blog posts at the end of the day, when I have something to write about – what I’ve accomplished that day, what I’m working on, etc.
But what’s really interesting to me right now is that a fair number of people seem to be reading this blog. I’ve got something like 227 hits just since I started this blog less than a month ago. That may not sound like a lot, but I’m doing very little to promote it.
My original intention was to both document the building of Hub Solution Designs as a company, and to record my thoughts on Master Data Management and Customer Data Integration – trends, the industry, different players in it, etc.
I’ve done mostly the former and very little of the latter so far, but I think that will change over time as the company-building stuff gets taken care of and my time frees up to share my thoughts on MDM and CDI.
Even though I’ve done this once before and know from experience what needs to be done to found a successful company, I’m finding a book called “Six-Week Start-Up” by Rhonda Abrams very helpful. It’s a very thorough checklist of things to do in order to establish a new company. You can find it on Amazon.com here.
Anyway, if you’re reading this, leave a comment – I would love to hear from you, find out what your reaction and feedback might be, and how I can make this blog more of a two-way dialogue than a one-way monologue.
