Lessons learned from a MDM workshop.

Last week i joined a SAI workshop "Master Data Management" teached by Jan Henderyckx and it was a learnfull session. Below i'll describe some interesting topics about this workshop (in my opinion).

Business case
The first point is about what the reason could be for implementing MDM. There are two indicators for this: Risk and Value. Risk is about quality of the data in your systems and what is the change that this would result in a business problem. For instance, what is the risk that information about adresses of customers in a database is wrong and that letters/email are bounced back. For example, commercial ads being delivered to the wrong address is a small problem but delivering invoices to the wrong address is a much bigger problem.

Values is about Return Of Investments (ROI). How much can we save if we implement MDM? Lets say we have a business that have erroneous data about customers and due to wrong adresses invoices are returned. In this case it's easily to calculate the losses because of wrong addresses. Surveys among MDM users tells us that they find it very difficult to calculate ROI on MDM. So there is much work to do.

What is correct data?
This seems to be a difficult question. Correct data is always compared to something else and there are two distinctions possible: comparison with the real world objects (identity management) and comparison with other data ("i know that the data is different but i don't know which data is correct"). And an another interesting statement is that you can invest unlimited time and money in approving dataquality. Focus on the most important attributes and define a KPI for a to be reached goal of dataquality.

MDM goes EIM
Without 5 or 10 year we are not talking about MDM anymore, but we are talking about EIM (Enterprise Information Management). We shouldn't be careful with masterdata ONLY, but we need to handle ALL data carefully.  So the leassons we learn from MDM projects should be adopted in EIM. We need to care about Governance, Compliance, Business Process Redesign (BPR), Business Process Management.

So thats it for now.

Hennie