Hub Solution Designs | Hub Designs | Newsletter - "Best Practices in MDM"

Our blog is getting about 1,500 visits per month right now, and it’s been growing an average of 20% every month over the last year. Our readers are business and IT professionals who are passionate about MDM and Data Governance.

Each job posted on MDM Jobs will also be featured in our "Best Practices in Master Data Management" newsletter, which goes out each month to more than 3,350 people.

To post a job, just send an e-mail to mdmjobs@hubdesigns.com. We’ll send you a simple template to fill out and return. The cost is $100 per month for each position listed, and we accept PayPal, American Express and company checks.

To give you an idea of our reach in this area, the article announcing this on our blog has been read 215 times since it came out on Saturday Dec. 6th. And it’s listed #7 on Google, #1 on Yahoo and #1 on Microsoft Live Search for the search “MDM Jobs”.

Click here to request more information on "MDM Jobs" »

Top Blog Posts for 2008

Here are our “Top 10 blog posts for 2008″ for anyone who may have missed some of them.

Ten Best Practices for Master Data Management — by far our most popular post (with thanks to MDMSource.com for featuring it on their site)
Our MDM Partnership Strategy — discusses our vendor-neutral strategy for partnering with the MDM hub vendors
Different Styles of MDM Hub — outlines differences between Registry, Transaction and Hybrid style hubs
MDM Business Case Creation & ROI Analysis — links to a “one-pager” on our Business Case Creation & ROI Analysis service
How Master Data Management is Similar to ERP — talks about the similarities between Enterprise Resource Planning and MDM
Metadata and Master Data Management — discusses what metadata is and some different approaches to managing it in the context of MDM
Critical Data Quality Questions — outlines four “hard questions” relating to data quality and MDM and suggests ways to answer them
Building a Data Governance Organization — five points to keep in mind as you build your data governance organization
Five Essential Elements of MDM — technology (hub, integration, data quality, external content) and organization/process (data governance) required to succeed with MDM
Importance of Integration to MDM — piece urging MDM project champions to think about the role and importance of data integration

If you’re interested in my articles in DM Review and 2008 speaking engagements, they’re outlined on the Publications page of our web site.

I've been using Twitter a lot lately. It's a free service that lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: "What are you doing?" You can follow my updates on Twitter by clicking the link below.

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Trip Report from Gartner MDM Summit

I recently attended Gartner’s second Master Data Management Summit in Chicago. I didn’t make it to last year’s event, but I attended this one to look into exhibiting next year, and to gather information on how the MDM market is doing in the current economic climate.

The first session, by John Radcliffe and Andrew White, was on “Where MDM Is Going over the Next Five Years”. They felt MDM is more relevant than ever in today’s economic meltdown.

Projects will need to offer incremental value, without being too tactical. Developing a data stewardship culture doesn’t hit the capital expense budget. They recommended people focus on the “hard benefits”, efficiencies and compliance requirements, while preparing for the (eventual) upturn. And they strongly suggested developing the metrics to quantify and communicate the value of your MDM program.

They presented the “MDM Hype Report Card”, saying that the hype cycle is at or near its peak. The links between MDM, business process management, service-oriented architecture and business intelligence remain unclear to many users. And external service providers (in their opinion) are finally starting to add some value to MDM programs. They predicted that by 2012, 70% of SOA projects will fail to yield expected results unless they include MDM.

Andrew and John covered Gartner’s “Seven Building Blocks”: vision, strategy, metrics, governance, organization, process and technology, and recommended a business-driven, holistic approach to MDM, which I’ve been recommending for a couple of years now.

I really enjoyed “Building the Business Case for MDM” by Michael Smith. It was an engaging, thorough review of Gartner’s recommended steps for creating a robust MDM business case.

After covering the process for developing an effective business case, Michael discussed how metrics can be used to quantify the benefits, and how to use the business case to manage the initiative through the entire lifecycle.

The main argument for taking the time to create a detailed business case is the fact that without one, IT projects in general seem to have only a 50% success rate, but when you invest the time to create a robust business case, the success rate goes up to as high as 75%. If your IT project budget is high enough, that higher success rate translates into some serious savings.

I attended the IBM session highlighting Nationwide’s “Transformation to a Customer-Centric Organization”, and I enjoyed hearing Tara Paider, their Lead Architect for Customer Information Management.

On Day 2, I attended the “MDM Excellence Award” finalist presentations. Asian Paints, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems and State Street Bank all told an impressive story.

It was significant that J&J and State Street are both Siperian MDM customers.

I also attended a VIP session where Gartner invited DataFlux to speak about the benefits of exhibiting at the conference. Rick Woodland from State Street Bank and Ken Jacquier from W.W. Grainger gave their perspectives as attendees.

I had a great briefing with Lorita Vannah and John Evans from Kalido, and walked away feeling much more aware of Kalido’s product features and their approach to analytical MDM.

I spent some time in the Solutions Showcase, and was talking with Steve Meister and Ken Kotansky from AMB Predictive Data Management. We recently signed a Service Partnership agreement with AMB, and will be using their data profiling and data quality tools on client engagements going forward. I’ve been very impressed with their product’s capabilities and by how flexible and easy it is to work with the company.

Then, I met with Julie Langenkamp, the editor-in-chief of DM Review magazine, and her colleague David Boone. Starting in January ’09, I’ll be writing a monthly column in the print edition of DM Review. We brainstormed some other ways we can work together more closely.

Towards the end of the day, I hung out at the Siperian hospitality suite. I’ve been impressed for a while now with Nancy Ellickson, Siperian’s Senior Director of Corporate Marketing. The gathering was very well attended and a number of Siperian people were on hand, chatting with customers and potential customers. I had a great time and thought the understated, classy “California Picnic” theme was the perfect way to end the day.

I had dinner with a good friend from D&B/Purisma, catching up on things and chatting about the MDM market in general and how well Purisma in particular has been doing in 2008.

At the very end of the conference, Gartner announced that the winner of the 2008 Gartner “MDM Excellence Award” was Johnson & Johnson Healthcare Systems. It was a fitting way to end the conference.

The attendees and exhibitors I spoke to all commented on the power of Gartner’s brand and said that the conference seemed well-attended, with good content.

I’m a big fan of Aaron Zornes at The MDM Institute and the MDM Summit conference he puts on twice a year in the U.S. with SourceMedia. I’ve attended all six events they’ve done together in the last three years, and have spoken at five of them.

But I see the appeal of the Gartner MDM event as well. At this stage in the development of Master Data Management, competition is a good thing - between software vendors, services firms, and conferences. It makes us all better to have another entry in the market to measure ourselves against and to strive to outdo.

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