Blog: Jill Dyche

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MDM in '07--The Year of Implementation

In which Jill makes her lone prediction for 2007, to wit: Companies will begin MDM Phase 1. (Watch for her end-of-2007 retrospective and see if they succeeded!)

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to be able to centralize our data on an enterprise data warehouse and have it all fit together. We were supposed to automate our data quality through hard-coded ETL and watch the data become continually refined over time. We were supposed to be able to rely on EII to federate our queries across platforms so data integration was easy.

But it didn’t happen that way. Our tools have let us down. The data warehouse doesn’t house all the data we need, and the data is does have is variously latent and inconsistently defined. Our ETL tools represent yesterday’s business rules. And EII is a tough sell to executives with organizational ADD.

And that’s just the easy stuff. The hard part has been putting the business functions and processes in place to manage our data in a sustained way according to a centralized set of data governance standards and policies. Our inability to manage our data based on specific subject areas has had lasting business consequences, from botched customer loyalty programs to executives sweating over compliance reporting. Master Data Management is the set of policies and processes around managing your company’s reference data across subject area domains. It’s bigger than data quality, business rules, or conformed dimensions. It’s much loftier and more organizationally challenging than simply buying a software tool.

And that brings me to CDI. Customer Data Integration automates the reconciliation and quality of customer master data. Lately there have been plenty of debates on whether MDM is a subset of CDI or vice versa. (Both are true.) But what’s certain is that companies need operational integration of disparate customer data more than ever.

If 2006 was the year of MDM research, 2007 is the year MDM implementation. Our clients are putting the pedal to the metal and starting MDM Phase 1. It’s gonna be a fun ride.

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