Earlier this week I attended the MDM Insight event that TDWI ran in Savannah, GA. The hosted event employed a different model than other TDWI events, in which qualified participants were invited to attend, and vendor sponsors were provided with direct access to demonstrate their products' capabilities.

One of my roles at the event was to moderate a short workshop session to help attendees articulate what they believed were their most critical needs for master data management. One interesting common reaction was confusion about what composed an MDM solution, and what were the vendors actually selling. Another frequent reaction was expressing difficulty in lining up the requisite set of ducks within a reasonable amount of time to garner enough "horizontal support. Third, a general consensus was that instituting MDM was best done as an adjunct to existing application development (e.g. to support BI), focusing on small projects.

Actually, that last one confused me a bit, since if it only centering on a small application area (and not the whole enterprise), could it really be "master data" management?

Oh, one more thing - it may be worthwhile to consider the qualitative (and feasibility) differences between creating a "single golden source of truth" and an environment supporting the transparent access to a unified view of uniquely identifiable master objects (my current definition of what MDM is, by the way).