Preparing for the Organizational Impact of MDM

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

MDM is not a quick fix, one-shot deal. Rather, it is an extensive analysis and remediation process followed by an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. As such, consultants spearheading MDM projects should educate clients up front about the organizational impact MDM will have on their business, and what they might do to prepare for success.

1. Secure top-down buy in

Master data management must be viewed as a vital enterprise initiative and have the requisite C-level backing. Here it is important to note that we’re not just talking about the CIO. Because of MDM’s business-wide impact, it is imperative that all executives of an organization be on board with an MDM project.

Only complete executive level buy-in can drive enterprise-wide user adoption and wholesale cooperation among data owners. Companies that perform MDM must secure executive support, enforce an operational commitment to execution, and maintain a very disciplined and phased approach.

2. Prepare to embrace change

Bill Swanton, research vice president with AMR Research Inc., notes "[MDM] is a set of business processes and technology, not just one or the other." People don’t like to change, and MDM asks them to change how they do their jobs. The software is less important than the organizational changes companies make in the ways they do business. If MDM is used to improve the ways employees take orders and manufacture, ship and bill for goods, the value will be evident. If the software is simply installed without any attempt to improve the ways employees do their jobs, value will be hard to identify—indeed, the new software could slow processes down by simply replacing old software that employees know with new software that they don’t.

Successful MDM initiatives begin with a close evaluation of business units to discover specific issues around inconsistent data. It's key for IT and business to get together and prioritize areas where change is needed before embarking on any MDM plan. Companies must be committed to identifying and addressing the many flawed business processes responsible for data problems before throwing money at MDM software in hopes of solving the problem. Change will not simply be a possible consequence of MDM. It will be a certainty. Companies must make this clear at the outset.

3. Establish data governance & stewardship

Finally, data governance and stewardship is integral to any MDM initiative. Gaining acceptance for a single store of master data represents a significant cultural challenge for most businesses. Questions such as who owns the master data, who defines what entities mean, and how changes to existing definitions and relationships are managed must be carefully examined and definitively answered. These questions and their answers form the basis of an MDM data governance and stewardship program.

A selection of key data governance rules includes determining who can read, create, update, and delete data; what validity checks are required for data; which application is the preferred source for data items; How long will data be retained; what privacy policies are enforced; how is confidential data protected: and what disaster recovery provisions are required.

The role of a data steward is to ensure that the rules of data governance are enforced, and that master data is clean, consistent and accurate. Technical aspects of data stewardship involve a set of tools that help a steward find, analyze and fix data quality issues. These tools are generally integrated into a “stewardship console” that incorporates the data profiling, data analysis, and data modification tools into a single UI.