Pssst! Get in here! Good, you're here. Welcome to my expert channel on customer data integration (CDI), master data management (MDM) and data governance.  We’ve been waiting for you.

As you've probably heard, customer master data – its management, its deployment, and its governance – is a hot topic these days, not only for business intelligence (BI) professionals, but in the executive dining room and around the IT water cooler. MDM and data governance are challenging the standard paradigm of how to provide a consistent and trustworthy view of customer information. It’s nothing less than disruptive, and it’s causing quite a stir in IT architecture and application developer circles, too. We’ve watched CDI hubs serve as the seminal effort for launching initiatives around master data management, deploying service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and beginning information center of excellence initiatives. A few brave execs are even revamping their enterprise CRM strategies around emerging MDM capabilities, and some data warehouse teams are looking hard at where their future investments are going. But mostly, we’ve watched MDM become a bona fide and permanent part of corporate infrastructures, driving significant business payback.

There are lots of different ingredients in the data governance recipe. We’ll whip up some tactics for what it takes for both the IT and business sides to collaborate. We’ll toss in some best practices and offer some real-world examples of companies that are doing things right. We’ll thicken the sauce with decision rights and accountability structures. Of course, data stewardship is a staple, so we’ll throw that into the pot. We may even bring some vendors to a boil. And by dinnertime, we’ll have a veritable bouillabaisse of data management topics to sample.

So now that you’re here, pull up a chair. And if you’re game, weigh in by e-mailing me at jilldyche@baseline-consulting.com. Glad you could make it.

Jill is a partner co-founder of Baseline Consulting, a technology and management consulting firm specializing in data integration and business analytics. Jill is the author of three acclaimed business books, the latest of which is Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth, co-authored with Evan Levy. Her blog, Inside the Biz, focuses on the business value of IT.

Editor's Note: More articles and resources are available in Jill's BeyeNETWORK Expert Channel. Be sure to visit today!