Getting the Most Out of Your MDM Initiative
Posted by 
Share this Post
Making sure you're squeezing the most out of your MDM initiative with these strategies.
In my last post, I covered why improving business processes goes hand in hand with a master data management initiative. In this post, let’s talk about the different approaches to making this happen.
Let’s say your MDM initiative is underway, and you’re making good progress. You’ve implemented your MDM hub, and you’ve gone through an initial phase of de-duplication and data quality improvement. Data stewards are actively working tasks generated. You’ve even got a data governance charter with a three year roadmap.
The question is, what next? How do you minimize data quality problems from occurring in the first place? How do you minimize the load on your data stewards? How can you keep improving the quality of match/link results from your hub? We’ll look at when process improvements are enough, and when more is needed.
Process
The “no-code” answer is process improvements. We talked through this in my last blog post. This should always be the place to start. As part of the overall data governance charter, the processes around consumption and production of master data, current and future, need to be understood, evaluated and monitored.
Process improvements generally require little IT investment. However, they may not be entirely effective without the tooling to support them. For example, you can instruct your sales staff to search for existing accounts before creating new accounts. Who knows if they are going to thoroughly follow this process when they’re rushing off to their next sales call? Nevertheless, process is the foundation for other approaches.
Application Customization
To enforce process with a seamless user experience, consider customizing your enterprise applications. Many applications have now evolved to take advantage of service-oriented architectures, providing extension points to integrate additional functionality.
In the previous example of the “search before create new account” process for our CRM system, we could potentially extend the create account event to enforce this process.
By making it part of every attempted account creation, sales reps are at least prompted that a high-likelihood match may exist, so they avoid creating a duplicate account in the first place.
While application customization has become simpler over time, it can require a significant IT investment. Customizing a COTS application can also increase costs during the next upgrade cycle of the application.
Going forward with this option depends on the IT skills of your organization, as well as the openness of the platforms you’d like to integrate. There are several questions to consider:
- Are there well-defined extension points in the enterprise application and the MDM hub you’d like to integrate to?
- Are open standards such as web-services supported?
- Are the MDM APIs object-based so that you can create maintainable code based on master data such as product, organization or person, or are they proprietary?
I recommend focusing on the low-hanging fruit. Start with future state process workflows. Walk through each process improvement, and review the applications requiring change. Evaluate your priorities on the following criteria:
- High frequency processes (how often is the workflow triggered)?
- Impact of the process change (how much difference in data quality will the change make)?
- Ease of integration between the enterprise application and the MDM hub.
In this post, we’ve looked at some practical strategies to complement your MDM initiative. The first step is always a hard look at the current and future state view of your processes. The next step is considering where application changes can help support the future state processes.
In my next post, we will look further at integrating with MDM services and building MDM application functionality.
Leave a Response
Entries(RSS)