Blog: Jill Dyche

« On the Web, No One Can Hear You Scream. | Main | Reminder: Fabulous MDM Webcast on Tuesday »

Random Acts of MDM

In which Jill explains that MDM isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, and offers further reading material on the topic.

At the recent MDM Insight conference in Savannah, Georgia, I had the opportunity to have one-on-one meetings with conference attendees. I asked everyone I sat with whether they felt their companies were doing MDM at any level already. The answers were interesting.

"We have a product master on our ERP system," said a data manager from a medical equipment firm. "Is that MDM?"

“We have a reference index,” said someone from a high-tech firm. “It tells systems where the data is. But it’s kludgy. It doesn’t really integrate the data.”

“We have metadata,” said a business analyst from a pharmaceutical company. “Can we leverage it for MDM?”

It was interesting to hear stories of how companies had tried to enable pieces of MDM in bite-sized chunks, only to confront the reality that the small components of MDM don’t really solve the entire problem of reconciling and integrating disparate master data on behalf of the enterprise. So these companies live with random acts of MDM in the hope that someone can enhance them as full-blown solutions.

Of course, that rarely happens. Unless you position MDM as a bona-fide initiative in its own right, you’re never likely to get the business support, never mind the funding, that you need in order to deliver integrated master data.

That’s not to say that you can't start with basic MDM functionality and evolve it. Indeed, there are different levels of MDM maturity. At what stage is your company on the MDM continuum? Download The Baseline on MDM: Five Levels of Maturity for Master Data Management and find out.

Technorati tags: MDM, master data management, MDM maturity model, metadata, MDM methodology

Share: