MDM is a popular topic and many organizations are in different stages of MDM journey. Many times clients (primarily IT) want to engage consultants who can recommend a MDM tool and start the implementation, bypassing the Planning / Pre-planning stages. Typically this leads to a MDM solution which is not thought through completely or end up having similar Master Data problems even after implementing the tool.
One of my previous clients ran into the following situation after implementing MDM. The IT department had a very capable CIO and a strong technical team. In this case IT drove the MDM implementation. The team completed the MDM implementation successfully. But users hardly noticed the change or the improvement. The CIO recognized this right away and challenged his team to find a remedy to improve the perception. What happened?
Let us step back and look at the big picture of MDM and the various stages one has to go through for a successful MDM. Three Major stages of MDM Journey consists of:
- Planning / Pre-Planning stage
- Development / Implementation stage
- Steady state or ongoing support stage
Understanding the details of MDM will help align people, process and technology for these stages. Taking a holistic approach and developing the overall vision involves Business and IT working together. Analyzing the situation above told us:
| The users (Business) were not engaged in all stages in the right roles and level | Applies to all stages |
| Governance organization was not deep enough | Applies to all stages |
| Clear communication of benefits and metrics to track them were not in place | Planning, Steady State |
| Overall vision did not engage Business deep enough (ownership, monitoring) | Planning, Steady state |
| Steady state stage was not fully thought out (e.g. Competency center etc.) | Steady State |
At this point they reached outside the organization for help, to improve the perception and Business participation. IT understood the underlying technical MDM issues, and has even solved some of the complex Quality issues. But issue here was some of the approaches were fundamentally wrong. Granted this happened several years ago and one would imagine we would learn from these case studies and approach MDM differently. But to my surprise even today we get questions like “Can you suggest an MDM tool ?” casually, without thinking through the implications of embarking on an MDM journey.
Understanding each of the three MDM stages and engaging the business and communicating back is a critical part of a successful MDM program. Part of the MDM challenge is to make the Business engage in defining the policies, performance metrics etc. besides just implementing the MDM tool. In my experience, nimble and agile approaches are an option. But that doesn’t mean you don’t take the time to understand the magnitude of the issue and lay out a well thought out strategy. Finally, MDM is more than just an IT solution, though it saves a lot of headache for IT, it is an ongoing partnership program with Business and IT.
