Last year I was involved in a Data Governance initiative where product vendors were hitting the client with Multi-domain MDM solution. Vendors were offering the software at various price points and simply put confusing the client. The fact of the matter is the client did have a huge MDM problem to solve. Their issue is not multiple sources for the Master Data. They were not trying to solve M&A issues either.
Which way?
The real issue was the process. They did not have a strategy to manage neither Master Data creation nor the management of it. They have attempted in the past by cramming Master Data into some application without a process. Obviously they found this out when they built the spanking new data warehouse. Reports were not right, transaction weren’t matching up and the history tracking was non-existent etc. The manual process they go through is unbelievable. People hold back information about the Master Data; Operational activities like changes in business hours of the store fronts, store front location closing etc. were not captured in any application, except in departmental spreadsheets. In a retail store front, typically several things happen before the retail store is open for public or when the retail store is closed for business. Closing of a store front has several stages like inventory liquidation stage, lease termination stage and final stage where it is off the financial books. None of these events were captured through a consistent process.
What they needed is to take baby steps to create a process to capture the data and manage the data life cycle in an application and not jump into this full-blown MDM. So approaching this with a Multi-Domain tool was the wrong choice. I can’t blame the tool vendors because ‘If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail’. Of-course you can use the Multi-domain MDM to solve this, but the truth is the client is not ready for that kind of implementation.
Considering the volume of data is not huge, throwing a sharepoint or force.com solution is easy enough but without the buy-in from the business and not engaging them will end up in the same old sub-par data quality situation. Information governance is key to making MDM programs successful. Having a functioning and effective governance will help the organization immensely. So Multi-domain MDM is not always the best solution for all the MDM challenges.
