Hub Solution Designs, Inc.

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Newsletter - "Best Practices in MDM" - Vol. 1, No. 4

 

Welcome to the October edition of "Best Practices in Master Data Management", published by Hub Solution Designs, Inc.

 

In this month’s issue, we’ll cover:

 

    • the final countdown for the “Call for Papers” for the Oracle Applications Users Group’s COLLABORATE 09 conference,
    • our new two-day MDM seminar in partnership with The Perera Group, and
    • Business Drivers for Master Data Management Initiatives (by Gaurav Arora).

 

If you'd like to discuss your Master Data Management (MDM) or Data Governance initiatives, we'd love to hear from you.  Just call (781) 749-8910, or contact us via our web site.

 

Best regards --- Dan Power

 

 

If you are an Oracle Applications professional with an interest in Master Data Management, our members want to hear from and learn from you!

 

 

 

Present and you’ll attend COLLABORATE 09 for free. All selected presenters receive complimentary full conference registration — a value of USD $2,075! Plus, enter your proposal by October 31 and you may be one of two lucky recipients of a complimentary five-night hotel stay in Orlando.

 

 

    • Share best practices and tested solutions for Oracle Master Data Management,
    • Enhance your own Oracle knowledge through the peer networking and exchange,
    • Learn from Oracle experts and leaders through other education sessions.

 

 

 

We look forward to seeing you in Orlando!

 

Important Paper Submission Dates and Deadlines

 

    • January 12, 2009: Accepted presenters notified by the OAUG.
    • January 23, 2009: Acceptance of the compliance agreement due.
    • March 8, 2009: All presentation materials including white paper and presentations are due.

 

 

 

High quality, integrated master data is all that matters in your business/IT landscape. Sure, people, processes and technology are important. After all, they get the brunt of everyone’s attention. But in the end, superior business intelligence, smooth transactions and harmonious customer interactions all depend on the quality and usability of your master data.

 

Why This Seminar Program?


Hub Designs and Perera have teamed up to create this important, two-day on-site seminar program for organizations struggling with low quality, fragmented enterprise data. With over 40 years of combined experience, you can expect a new level of practical insight that is unavailable in any other forum.

 

Our goal is to bring unparalleled Master Data Management expertise to your front door. A blend of education and hands-on guidance, your organization will gain the knowledge to confidently undertake and succeed with your MDM initiative... and transform your enterprise master data into an appreciating corporate asset.

 

Agenda For Mastering Your Data

 

Together, we will explore the issues, challenges and opportunities associated with creating and maintaining high quality, integrated enterprise master data:

 

  • Creating a business case for managing customer, product, supplier, financial and employee master data
  • Analyzing the types, nature and severity of enterprise data quality problems
  • Determining quality and integration requirements for enterprise master data
  • Creating enterprise master data architecture and models
  • Formulating a plan to correct and transform your existing enterprise master data
  • Developing and embracing master data content and format standards
  • Integrating and synchronizing master reference data within and across enterprise systems
  • Identifying, evaluating and selecting MDM software and third-party data sources
  • Designing data quality processes for continuous master data management
  • Determining metrics for assessing, monitoring and certifying the quality of master data
  • Organizing and managing a data governance and stewardship program

 

Who Should Participate?

 

This program is geared to business, project management and IT personnel who are actively involved in Master Data Management (MDM), Customer Data Integration (CDI) and data quality initiatives. The ideal session brings together up to 15 participants from your organization to discuss the production, distribution, consumption and maintenance of enterprise data.

 

By conducting this program at your site, stakeholders have the flexibility to join program segments that are appropriate to their functional areas. We charge a fixed program fee so you can tailor attendance to your needs.

 

Schedule TODAY!

 

For more information or to schedule this two-day program at your location, please call 781-749-8910 or visit our web site. 

 

 

Imagine your company’s senior management has decided to embrace data governance and Master Data Management (MDM) as part of its new corporate strategy.

 

So you’re tasked with identifying the high level business requirements, creating a data governance framework, evaluating vendors and their products, “shortlisting” a few vendors for a proof of concept, and then presenting your findings back to the steering committee.

 

To get up to speed, you attend the MDM Summit and other conferences, talk to experts, assess your company’s data landscape, and gather high level requirements. Now you’re ready to kick off the Evaluation & Selection phase. Sounds great! But watch out for some common potholes on the road to selecting the right vendor.

 

You will need to build an evaluation matrix or scorecard for the MDM vendors, including both your selection criteria and their respective weights. Earlier, we covered the top criteria for evaluating MDM vendors. To recap, here are some recommended criteria:

 

    1. Does the vendor support multiple domains or types of critical master data?
    2. In what vertical industries does the vendor have a strong presence?
    3. Does their product fully support a service-oriented architecture? What services are provided “out-of-the-box”?
    4. Does their product have workflow capability or an MDM methodology built-in?
    5. Does the vendor have an integrated flexible hierarchy management tool?
    6. What third-party data providers do they integrate with (e.g. D&B, Axciom, Trillium, etc.)?
    7. Is their solution used primarily for operational or analytical MDM?
    8. What’s the state of resource availability in the market (or at SI firms) to implement their solution?
    9. Do they have an integrated data quality engine for standardization, matching and measurement purposes?
    10. Lastly, are they easy to work with in terms of response times, flexibility, and demonstrated alignment with your corporate objectives?

 

This is not an exhaustive list but it should get you thinking.

 

What we want to cover in this article is that you need to identify the business driver(s) for MDM and then prioritize the selection criteria based on those business drivers. A few examples should help clarify.

 

The idea of improving critical customer data can originate in any part of the organization. It could be coming from the division / departmental level, from the “C Suite” or a mandate from the Compliance function.

 

Where the idea is originating from will itself require changing the weightings of the various criteria on your evaluation scorecard.

 

In the last year, TJX - a publicly traded retailer on the East Coast – announced the largest ever customer data security breach. If TJX ever does an MDM initiative, customer data security will obviously be a very important selection criteria and overall project goal.

 

But consider as another example an initiative driven by compliance requirements relating to customer master data. In that case, be sure to define the solution to center on customer data.

 

Sometimes, your IT partners may be tempted to load you up with their wish list for SOA and multi-domain support. You may have to push back and emphasize that mastering customer data for compliance purposes, and carefully managing access, control and data security are the main plays here. But remember, you probably will need help from IT to redefine the data security for current applications that hold customer data.

 

The design of the hub may need to be operational, rather than analytical. Understanding customer relationships and security requirements will probably come from the business, which is appropriate. In that case, business process management, workflow and a robust rules engine might take a back seat. An important criterion for such an organization could be the MDM hub’s flexibility in defining security roles and how granular those roles can be.

 

Audit trail requirements are typically at the data element level and your data access policy will need to be supported by the software. It will be important to be able to track the history of changes made to master data. That master data may go through several stages in its lifecycle before being published, and a metadata management tool (as part of the MDM suite), can help you to show the full history of changes made, including “who did what when”.

 

In this example, when assigning data stewardship roles, the most likely candidates will come from the Governance, Risk and Compliance organization.

 

Now, let’s contrast this with an initiative from Corporate M&A in a different company.

 

Here the main drivers will be data quality and customer hierarchies. In this type of project, the MDM hub style would be probably be Analytical, with a tightly integrated Data Quality / Profiling tool. Data Stewards would mostly be from the IT organization supporting the M&A group.

 

The project’s success would be measured on Key Performance Indicators built on quality metrics generated from the hub.

 

Most likely, business process workflows will not be needed, and a collaborative hub style would not be appropriate.

 

Integration with external data providers will probably play an important role. Data access and security will be less critical in this type of project.

 

Management may not have a large budget for this type of initiative and its scope will probably be limited. Upon success with this project, the team may go back to management for more funding to increase the scope towards being enterprise-wide.

 

Typically, such data quality initiatives have limited life spans. The IT team’s role will be as a strategic consultant and to try to show the business a vision of making this a larger enterprise-wide project.

 

So in summary, change the weights on your evaluation criteria based on your organization’s MDM business drivers.

 

If you’re in the process of evaluating MDM vendors, Hub Solution Designs can provide you with a free vendor evaluation scorecard. Just click here and we’ll be glad to help.

 

 

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