Mastering Data Management

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Make sure you plan out the essential stops on your roadmap

In previous posts, we’ve discussed why an MDM roadmap is essential to the success of your MDM initiative. You wouldn’t plan a roadtrip without at least consulting a map (whether online or in an old-fashioned atlas) and ensuring that you knew where you planned to stop along the way.

The same is true with MDM. You can’t expect to embark on a multi-year journey to better data management without taking the time to consider important stops along the way.

Doing so is similar to planning a journey with your family. If you were planning a car trip across the country, you wouldn’t begin driving blindly from New Jersey to California. Rather, you would talk to the other travelers to determine where it was important to stop along the way.

What stops are essential to your family? Are Civil War battlefields important to your history-buff brother? Does your wife want to see the Art Institute of Chicago? Is your youngest begging to see the Corn Palace?

Since there’s not (yet) a GPS system for your MDM journey, a roadmap is essential.

Rather than blindly grasping at potential domains, a reasonably comprehensive MDM roadmap should consider these elements:

1. Business Benefits
2. Systems and Applications in Scope of MDM
3. Data Domains, Entities, and High-level Data Model
4. Relationships & Hierarchies
5. 3rd Party Data Sources
6. Systems Decommissioning Strategy
7. Data Hub Usage Style
8. Data Hub Ownership Style
9. Data Volume and Performance Considerations
10. Reference Data
11. Deployment Strategies and User Groups
12. Related Initiatives
13. Master Data Governance Maturity
14. Master Data Quality Processes, Metrics and Technology Support
15. Integration with Unstructured Data
16. Multi-lingual Requirements
17. Complexity of cross-domain Information Sharing
18. Complexity of Data Security and Visibility Requirements
19. People resources and skills
20. Data Quality Technologies, ETL, SOA and ESB

Some domains may be more important than others for a specific enterprise. Still, it is a good idea to look at all of them first, prioritize some of them and possibly de-prioritize others based on your enterprise’s needs.

What has your experience been? Which of these have you found most important to your MDM journey? Which can be overlooked? And which is your Corn Palace?

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