Over the last 4 years we have seen Customer Data Integration (CDI) evolve into Master Data Management (MDM), heard many debates about MDM architectural styles, features and functions, operational vs. analytical, and the ever present need for an MDM platform to have web services so that applications could be developed to manage and retrieve the valuable master data contained within the MDM system. In fact, one vendor used to tout the number of services they shipped with their Hub (Hundreds) as an indicator of why they were the best MDM platform.
Fast forward to present day. Many MDM systems are now up and running, processing master data sourced from internal CRM, ERP, legacy applications to create a Reliable Trusted Golden Record (RTGR), but they have not yet “mastered” the ability to enable business users to directly create and consume master data from the MDM system. As a result, business users continue to create incomplete, inconsistent and duplicate data within their business applications (CRM, ERP, etc.) but those applications are unable to enforce data quality at the point of creation. The result is that data stewards end up retroactively resolving those problems downstream. This situation quickly creates a bottleneck because shear volume of errors means that data stewards cannot fix the thousands of bad data records fast enough. While providing more features and functions to data stewardship consoles and improving back end automatic processing capabilities helps the problem somewhat, many companies are now realizing that a possible solution could be to take a leaf out of Business Intelligence (BI) in the 90’s by giving more exposure and management of Master Data to the business users.
In order to do this, IT must now decide how they apply a business user facing user interface (UI) on top of their MDM Hub all the while noting that the other types of master data will likely be added to the Hub with ever changing business requirements. They also face ever changing standards by which popular UI interaction technologies continue to evolve and mature. Many IT are not equipped to do custom application development. Even if they could, there is that little problem of finding enough additional bandwidth to learn how to incorporate those hundreds of services to embark on major ground-up development of new applications. Finally the maintenance and change costs would be high.
What is needed is for MDM platforms to move to the next level. The architecture of a MDM platform should be integrated, model/metadata driven and flexible enough to apply the latest technologies in UI, workflow, etc. along with tight security. All these should be easily achievable through configuration rather than coding.
MDM for the business masses, it’s time.
Originally posted on the Siperian Blog at http://siperian.typepad.com/siperian_blog/2009/03/mdm-for-the-business-masses-its-time.html