Mastering Data Management

More in Business Process Management

• New ebook: Understanding Big Data
• 37 Definitions of “Employee ID”
• Defining Terms: Agree, or Doom your Project
• Establishing a Valid Business “Need to Know” for Sensitive Data

More in MDM

• Best Practices in Test Data Management: Discovering and Subsetting
• TDWI Chicago Preview: Data Warehousing, Analytics & More
• Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Data?
• MDM for Chief Privacy Officers: A healthcare provider example

More from Lawrence Dubov

• MDM Vs Data Governance: History and 8 Predictions
• What’s Harder: Starting or Sustaining MDM?
• Conclusion: Quantifying Assets
• 3 Essential Questions for Data Quality: Benchmarks, Penalties & Latency

Share this Post

Recent Comments

• ICMCC News Page » Where East Meets West: ehealth in China and the US on Where East Meets West: ehealth in China and the US
• Kim’s Training Podcast on Training as a Safety Net: Kim May
• TDWI Chicago Preview: Data Warehousing, Analytics & More | Mastering Data Management on New ebook: Understanding Big Data

Make sure you've built the right roadmap before beginning your MDM journey

In my previous series of blog posts we discussed MDM business benefits, methods of their estimation and the factors you must understand to successfully initiate an MDM program. Even if business benefits are estimated and understood by the enterprise, the business case for MDM is incomplete and cannot be quantified if the costs and risks are not estimated.

When an enterprise embarks on an enterprise MDM program, it is critical for the stakeholders to understand key decision points that determine the initiative’s costs, risks and risk mitigation strategies. These are all components of a functional MDM roadmap, which must stem from a vision shared and communicated among stakeholders.

An enterprise that begins an MDM program without a properly defined implementation roadmap will not be able to proactively understand the target state of MDM and its evolution from release to release. This will adversely impact planning and the ability to execute the program.

Without proper understanding of What, When, and, at a high level, How, it is impossible to articulate:

• Which benefits will be realized (and when)
• What areas of the enterprise will be impacted (and when and how)
• What resources (people, hardware, software, etc) will be required

Consequently, without a profound MDM roadmap, it is not feasible to intelligently estimate the program costs and when they will be incurred. Even if the benefits of MDM are clear, without cost estimates, the enterprise cannot complete a cost-benefit analysis and estimate ROI and NPV.

Ultimately the MDM stakeholders cannot make a substantive go / no-go decision about the MDM initiative. In the absence of a properly developed MDM roadmap, it’s simply not feasible to truly understand and estimate dependencies and risks.

A properly developed MDM roadmap, at a high level, defines program releases for the enterprise MDM evolution over 1-5 years. For a multi-phase MDM program, the immediate phase is planned in more detail. The phases that follow are planned with decreasing levels of detail, while including enough information to drive the most important decisions.

For a multi-phase MDM implementation the MDM roadmap document is a “living summary” that evolves as the initiative progresses rather than a document created once at the beginning of the program and never touched later.

In my experience, I’ve encountered many cases where the teams responsible for the program claimed to have an MDM roadmap. The analyses that followed showed that the roadmaps have been defined in a very superficial way and lacked critical details. The MDM roadmap definition often was limited by a single dimension, only addressing the data domains to be specifically addressed by MDM, such as:

• Phase 1: Customer
• Phase 2: Location
• Phase 3: Product
• Phase 4: Other

Such a superficial roadmap does not provide enough information to estimate costs or resources, evaluate risk, and establish confidence among stakeholders that have developed a common MDM vision as a team.

Some other enterprises initiating an MDM programs tend to fall to the other extreme.

They try to envision many lower level details that may not be predictable since the answers depend on factors that can be refined only in the future.

The intent to have too many details understood and refined may result in an analysis / paralysis scenario where discussions that are supposed to refine questions generate many other unanswered questions and uncertainties. As a result the initiative fails to start for months or even years.

The challenge of the MDM roadmap resides in prioritizing the most critical questions that greatly impact costs and risks while postponing other less important questions.

Some questions are critical enough to be impactful but they cannot be answered at the time of the program commencement. In this case it may be a good idea to identify potential solution options, and the associated uncertainties and risks.

Next week, we'll begin by discussing the varied costs of your MDM roadmap.

This is part of a series, Building an MDM Roadmap. For other posts and a complete index, view the Table of Contents.