Monday | 24 November, 2008
One Company, One Vision, One Truth
As Nationwide grew, its data became siloed and scattered, making it increasingly difficult for the company to get an accurate picture of its finances. Here’s how it brought all that data into focus
Sidebar: What Is Master Data Management?
Master data management projects come in all shapes and sizes. Most often, MDM addresses customer data management requirements, hence the term customer data integration, or CDI, which is often used interchangeably with MDM, though many contend the concepts differ. But MDM, as it's now used, boils down to a set of processes and technologies that help enterprises better manage their data flow, its integrity and synchronization. At the core is a governance mechanism by which data policies and definitions can be enforced on an enterprise scale.
The result is much more than just clean data. MDM offers companies a tantalizing vision: a "single version of the truth" gathered from vast databases of internal assets, says James Kobielus, principal analyst of data management at market researcher Current Analysis. Heard it all before? "MDM is a relatively new term for a timeless concern," Kobielus concedes. That hasn't tempered vendor enthusiasm. Vendors of all stripes - BI, data warehousing, data management, performance management, CRM, ERP - are rolling out their disparate products under the MDM banner. Forrester reports that MDM licence and service revenue from software vendors and systems integrators will grow from $US1.1 billion in 2006 to more than $US6.6 billion in 2010.
Even with all the vendor buzz, research conducted last year shows that CIOs are struggling with data management: 75 percent of 162 CIOs surveyed by Accenture said they want to develop an overall information management strategy in the next three years in order to "leverage that data for strategic advantage". But a Forrester Consulting survey of 407 senior IT decision makers at companies with more than $US250 million in annual revenues found that manual efforts remain the dominant approach for integrating data silos.
That's because an MDM transformation is as much about mastering change management as it is about data management. As Kobielus says, "In the hyper-siloed real world of enterprise networking, master data is scattered all over creation and subjected to a fragmented, inconsistent, rickety set of manual and automated processes." Good master data governance can happen only when the various constituencies that own the data sources agree on a common set of definitions, rules and synchronized procedures, all of which requires a degree of political manoeuvring that's not for the faint of heart.
- T WAILGUM
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