Your MDM and Data Integration Master Plan

Understand information scope and details before you invest

What is Master Data Management (MDM)? Baseline defines it this way:

Master Data Management is the set of disciplines and solutions that ensures corporate data is consistent and reconciled across subject areas and systems.

MDM Readiness Assessment helps you understand the details involved with a data integration development activity before you invest in moving forward. The assessment is both a review and an advisory activity.

The review activity narrows down the business problems that data integration at the operational level can address.

The advisory activity evaluates “your best MDM approach” as a comprehensive program to satisfy the critical success factors—platform architecture, development methods, end user participation, data governance, data management, and production support.

» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline

Your Challenges

• New versions of data from mergers and globalization
• Integrated and accurate data to:
  …increase marketing program yields
  …manage sales territories
  …manage customer hierarchies across lines of business
  …support regulatory compliance
• Leveraging existing investments while enhancing strategic systems such as CRM
• 40-60% of IT development costs for data acquisition and integration

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The Problem

Data integration may be your company’s most complex data challenge

You’ve got too much data in too many places, and the volumes are increasing exponentially. Silo-ed systems proliferate across the organization. The business need for a single version of information across all enterprise applications continues to grow. It’s becoming more critical than ever to not only integrate data, but define, cleanse, reconcile, and certify it.

If your company is considering an MDM initiative in support of Customer Data Integration (CDI), Product Information Management (PIM) or similar initiative, the business is probably already feeling some pain. You think you need to acquire new technologies and institute new processes to manage you master data. But are you ready?

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The Baseline Approach

Manage data disparity across analytic and transactional systems

Baseline views MDM as solving a different set of problems than a data warehouse or a transactional system. Therefore, it requires a different set of skills, technologies, and development approach. MDM Readiness Assessment prepares you to successfully navigate those differences.

The data warehouse is geared to supporting business users who use BI tools at the analytics level. MDM, on the other hand, operationalizes data integration on demand and serves enterprise applications with a single version of the truth through dynamic and automated processing.

The concept of a “hub”—a transactional platform that automates the cleansing, reconciliation, and integration of data from multiple systems, and then provisions that data to other systems and applications in real time—is central to sustaining MDM. The hub is the system of record for customer data and acts as a business service to systems and applications across the enterprise. As such, it requires that companies establish solid data management practices for data definition, cleansing, architecture, automation, and deployment.

Baseline’s MDM Readiness Assessment helps you plan for the complexity of a MDM program and guides you through the changes mandated by the following MDM critical success factors:

Platform Architecture: Determine how the current systems can support operational data integration, cleansing, and correction via CDI and MDM functionality.

Development Methods: Incorporate hub-specific development activities—such as data administration, testing, and acceptance –into IT’s traditional SDLC process.

End User Participation: Ensure that data quality is integral to MDM processing by having end users participate at critical requirements, testing, and verification phases.

Data Governance: Assess the existing data governance processes and recommend changes necessary to deploy a MDM solution that accurately reflects the company’s data ownership, sharing, and access policies.

Data Management: Implement data management methods and practices to address the range of data quality and support functions required by MDM.

Production Support: Adopt specialized production support methods to ensure that both business and IT stakeholders are equipped to address and resolve the numerous data quality issues that inevitably surface during the initial phases of hub deployment.

MDM Readiness Assessment Approach

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Your Value

Leveraging existing infrastructure while adopting best-of breed practices

The MDM Readiness Assessment helps you choose the best CDI , PIM, or hub solution for your company without over-investing. The recommendation will help you determine the following:

• The top business requirements and core functional requirements (for examples, hierarchy management).
• Whether to “build” or “buy”.
• Cost justification of the MDM initiative to management.
• How to manage the business’ expectations about MDM capabilities.
• How to integrate CDI or PIM hub solutions into an existing technology infrastructure.
• Changes or additions to an existing architectural framework (for example, SOA).
• How to introduce or improve data management functions and data stewardship roles.
• Who the key stakeholder constituencies are on both the business and IT sides.
• A practical implementation approach and tactical steps.

CDI Project Team Interrelationships

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Why Baseline

Thought leaders with real world experience in this emerging domain

Customer Data Integration, Reaching A Single Version of the Truth (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), by Baseline Partners—and the first book to market on the emerging subject of MDM and CDI—describes our exposure to a range of processing models, architectures, and vendors. Moreover, several Baseline clients are early adopters of CDI technologies and serve as real-life case studies.

With MDM, Baseline capitalizes on its heritage in data warehousing – integrating heterogeneous data into a “single version of the truth”. We understand the business value and efficiency promises of integrated data. And we bring a proven toolbox of implementation techniques to our engagements.

Our consultants are seasoned practitioners in all the areas relevant to implementing MDM – data quality, ETL, data modeling, business rules definition, and IT architecture development. We bring an understanding of incumbent applications, candidate data sources, data migration solutions, and architectural approaches to the MDM Readiness Assessment.

With a MDM Readiness Assessment, you have the advantage of connecting directly with Baseline’s intellectual capital and real world experience in this emerging domain.

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