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!
Master Data Management Best Practice #10 – Use a Balanced, Holistic Approach
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 recent Gartner “Magic Quadrant for MDM of Customer Data” by John Radcliffe had a great statement: “To succeed, you should put together a balanced MDM program that creates a shared vision and strategy, addresses governance and organizational issues, leverages the appropriate technology and architecture, and creates the necessary processes and metrics.”
Another illustration of the need to balance the technology with the people and process is a quote by the inventor and entrepreneur, Dean Kamen: “The technology is the easy part. Understanding what drives people – individuals, societies, what makes cultures clash – all of those questions are way, way harder to answer than how to solve any particular technical problem.”
This Best Practices series is based on a talk that I’ve given at the Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE and Oracle OpenWorld conferences a few times. The talk has evolved each time I’ve given it, but one consistent theme has been “being an MDM evangelist”. I believe in the nature of master data management and data governance to fundamentally change the IT architectures, business processes and organizational cultures (how we think of the core data that we use to run our businesses). And I think corporate America is overdue for these changes.
We’re all consumers who’ve had frustrating experiences with companies trying to do simple things like changing our addresses, stop receiving extra copies of catalogs, fixing errors on credit reports, etc. And we’ve all had the opposite experience, when a quick phone call or self service Web portal took care of everything. What a difference in the customer service experience!
And in the business-to-business world, there are a lot of companies out there that would like to make decisions more quickly, based on reliable data, that would like to reduce their supply chain spend, consolidate their enterprise applications, increase their revenue by up-selling customers, get paid more quickly by making sure invoices go to the right address every time, manage credit risk for new customers, understand customers’ corporate hierarchies, cut their new product introduction life cycle in half, and so on.
These are the types of innovations that our companies desperately need to be competitive in the next decade. The economy is improving – but slowly. As an MDM evangelist, what improvements and innovations can you bring to your company? And can you use the balanced, holistic approach to make sure that the shiny, new technology doesn’t outweigh the people, process and information sides of the picture?
You’ll succeed if you recruit the right executive sponsors; invest in creating a data governance team; design your data governance processes, and communicate how the MDM initiative is helping the company to achieve its strategic objectives. And above all, be persistent. Don’t take no for an answer. The company didn’t get into its current situation overnight, and fixing it won’t happen overnight either.
Please let us know – in the comments here or in the forums on the MDM Community – whether you’ve taken on the role of MDM evangelist in your organization, and if you need any help with it, please let us know.
My Take on Oracle OpenWorld 2010
I’m flying home today from Oracle OpenWorld 2010, which I enjoyed enormously, as usual. Beyond the “old home week” aspect of it – seeing old friends, who for some reason I only seem to see at the Oracle Applications Users Group COLLABORATE conference in the spring or at Oracle OpenWorld in the fall – there was a tangible energy in the halls, the session rooms and the exhibit areas this year. And the Black Eyed Peas’ performance Wednesday night was a lot of fun as well.
Let me start out by saying that Hub Designs is vendor agnostic – we partner with all of the leading MDM vendors, including Oracle, Informatica / Siperian, Initiate Systems / IBM, SAP, D&B / Purisma, and Kalido, and are having partnership discussions with others like Orchestra Networks and Stibo Systems.
But my roots in the Oracle community go back to 1995, and my knowledge investment in Oracle’s CRM, ERP and MDM products is considerable. So I feel very comfortable at OpenWorld, and have about 250 Oracle people in my address book.
So although we are vendor agnostic, it’s only natural that we’ve developed a strong relationship with some partners, and are still working on developing that level of partnership with others. It’s hard to have equally deep partnerships with ten or so different companies.
My schedule prevented me from arriving until Tuesday, and when I did get there, I didn’t feel too well. But I did get to some sessions on Wednesday, and I was particularly impressed by “MDM Customer Panel: Implementation Challenges and Best Practices with the MDM Institute, Credit Suisse, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Cricket Communications, and Wind River Systems”.
The session was a very practical Q&A, with different Oracle customers from different industries talking about their experiences, difficulties, and successes over the past four years or so. Several of them had implemented Oracle’s Customer Hub (formerly Siebel Universal Customer Master or UCM), with Wind River having implemented the Customer Data Hub (CDH) product.
The session also included Aaron Zornes, a prominent thought leader and Chief Research Officer of the MDM Institute. It was great to see him and to chat briefly after the session. If you’re able to, you should definitely register for the upcoming MDM and Data Governance Summit in New York City on October 3-5. I’ve been attending these for several years and always find them helpful in order to stay in touch with the pulse of what’s going on in the MDM and data governance space.
The session that I did with Bill Miller and Vanessa Hsu from Oracle was well attended, despite being in the very last time slot of the conference (Thursday at 3:00 pm). We had 101 people in the room, and even though we went a few minutes past the top of the hour, almost everyone stayed to the end. I talked about the need for change in today’s corporations, and the power of being an MDM evangelist in bringing innovation and change back to your company, as well as about the Top Ten best practices that I’ve observed over the past nine years of working in the fields of Data Governance and Master Data Management, across both the customer and product domains.
Bill Miller talked about how Oracle has applied these concepts to its own MDM needs, and its own six year journey from data quality chaos to finely tuned governance machine. It was great to hear, because I’ve known Bill for almost that entire time, and watched him go through some incredible projects, and grow into an important role as Global Solution Owner for Data Quality Management with Oracle’s IT function. He works closely with the business people (the Global Process Owners) in marketing, sales, finance, customer service, and so on. That virtual team is Oracle’s data governance board, and is responsible for some huge improvements in Oracle’s data quality picture over the last few years. Oracle implemented Oracle Customer Hub internally, and made some great process and cultural changes.
Vanessa Hsu is a Senior Product Strategy Manager at Oracle, and is responsible for a new product called Oracle Data Governance Manager. That product is an extension to Oracle Customer Hub, and provides a centralized administration tool for data stewards, giving easy access to key MDM operations, to increase data steward productivity and highlight enterprise-wide data quality metrics at a glance. It’s an important capability that Oracle will extend to its other hub products over its next release cycle.
The “feel on the street” in the MDM track at Oracle OpenWorld this year was that it was “full speed ahead” at Oracle. Gartner recognizes Oracle as one of the leaders in its “Magic Quadrant” for MDM, and deservedly so. There are a lot of smaller vendors with great technology too, but Oracle has done a lot to advance the state of the MDM art, and it was a pleasure to be in San Francisco this week to see their customers talk about their success. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years as Oracle introduces Fusion MDM to the market.
