Forewords

Finally we have the sequel! One that is from seasoned practitioners who have presciently zeroed in on the co-dependence of Master Data Management (MDM) and data governance.

Both Master Data Management and data governance programs are breaking new ground when it comes to complexity and business value justification for large-scale integration projects. Although established in the Global 5000–size financial service enterprises to some degree, Master Data Governance solutions are still an emerging area for both the vendor community and IT professionals. Moreover, there is a tremendous lack of published research on the convergence.

As chief research officer of The MDM Institute, I have been fortunate to work side by side with many of the same large enterprises that Alex and Larry have worked for and with in their MDM efforts. Early on, we commiserated about the lack of systemic rigor in providing the active data governance our clients were telling us they greatly needed. Clearly, our pioneering MDM ancestors were telling us to “go early, go governance” as we mutually came to the same determinations that:

• MDM and data governance are two vital IT initiatives that are both co-dependent and synergistic.

• Successful MDM requires a significant up-front data governance investment.

• Data governance as a discrete IT discipline benefits tremendously from the application of MDM.

At this point, potential readers should not need any more encouragement to read this book by two of the most experienced practitioners I know of. Clearly, Alex Berson and Larry Dubov were hard at work tackling the tough topic of “Master Data Governance” before the software vendor community had yet found religion (as the market now has “active,” “passive,” and my favorite “passive-aggressive” data governance flavors among the many marketing variations).

My team of research analysts and our Global 5000 IT clients greatly value the knowledge and skills that experienced pioneers such as Alex and Larry bring to our collective MDM consciousness. Now sit back and absorb… the industry’s biggest and best download on the convergence of MDM and data governance.

Aaron Zornes
Chief Research Officer, The MDM Institute, San Francisco, and Conference Chairman, MDM & Data Governance Summit (London, Madrid, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo)

The single version of truth. The golden record. The 360-degree view. These buzzwords capture the nirvana state that data management professionals have strived to deliver to their business stakeholders for decades. Years of multimillion-dollar investments in large enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, ERP, and CRM deployments and consolidations have only fanned the flames of discontent around data quality, data consistency, and ultimately, data trustworthiness. This was the environment that nurtured the birth and growth of the Master Data Management (MDM) market—including technology solutions such as Customer Data Integration (CDI) and Product Information Management (PIM), as well as consulting practices at management consultancies, systems integrators, and software vendors’ professional services organizations.

These MDM technologies and best practices have matured significantly over the past decade, but the ability for data evangelists to secure executive sponsorship and funding for these investments—while also ensuring active collaboration and participation in the MDM initiative from their business partners—has been an ongoing challenge. Many organizations boast customer and/or product masters in production today, but while some are delivering needed business value, others unfortunately struggle with adoption, business justification, and a demonstrable return on an often large investment.

But from an MDM adoption standpoint, something good came out of the global economic downturn of the late 2000s. CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs, all in desperate need of any fine-tuning levers they could find to control their shrinking margins, reduce increasingly complex compliance and regulatory risk, and identify ways to differentiate their organizations from competition, increasingly embraced MDM. For years, these senior executives told their employees and shareholders that data is the organization’s most critical asset, but finally they were providing resources to match the rhetoric. But having executive support is only step one. Knowing how to scope, plan, architect, implement, and administer an MDM capability remains a significant challenge. And MDM cannot deliver value and be effectively maintained without the implementation of a formal data governance program with active participation from both business and IT stakeholders—not an easy task in many corporate cultures with minimal business ownership and accountability for data quality.

To bridge this business/IT chasm, a key epiphany that all MDM evangelists must experience is the recognition that MDM and data governance initiatives should not be, and never should have been, about the data. Having a single trusted view of master data in some operational hub or analytical repository will never in fact directly deliver any of the strategic business drivers just listed. Trusted master data is only an enabler, and the goal of MDM and data governance must be to leverage trusted master data to improve the mission-critical business processes and decisions that actually run your business. So the key to MDM is something we at Forrester Research call “Process Data Management,” which is the goal of aligning your MDM vision with the business processes and decisions that are inseparable from master data. Your MDM and data governance efforts must not only be aligned, but must be an embedded part of your organization’s business process management and optimization strategies to ensure that trusted master data will in fact deliver the business value—and ultimately that prized single version of the truth we’ve been targeting for decades.

To help you on this journey through MDM’s next stage of maturity, Alex Berson and Larry Dubov deliver this guide that can be leveraged by the MDM evangelist, architect, practitioner, and data governance program driver alike. Use this book as a resource to help you through each critical phase of your MDM initiative—from scoping and business case development, through architecture, implementation, and governance—and most importantly, as a tool to educate and recruit the business process professionals within your organization who need trusted master data to end the vicious cycle of process data management failure they have been experiencing for years.

Rob Karel,
Principal Analyst
Forrester Research, Inc.