CRM - January 2008 - (Page 41)

MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT on your shortlist, but if you’re looking for a comprehensive MDM vendor, you’ll want to turn to IBM, Oracle, or perhaps Purisma,” he says, referring to the pure-play data vendor recently snapped up by Dun & Bradstreet. In other words, when it comes to selecting a vendor, make sure to balance any short-term gains against your longterm expectations. Don’t Mix Your Paints: Differentiate Between Governance and Management All too often, companies fail to differentiate between data governance and data management, leading to a fundamental breakdown in communication between technology folks and executives. Data governance refers to the corporate rules surrounding data, which in the context of MDM would include defining the attributes and characteristics of different data sets, determining who owns the data, and how employees should access and use it. “It’s the policy-making around decision rights and who owns the data,” Dyche says. “For example, it’s not a good idea to have a programmer during the middle of an [extract, transform, and load] job determining if revenue data should be categorized as either booked or billed data. It’s not that person’s decision. That’s what data governance needs to address.” Data management, on the other hand, is the tactical execution of such policies, and primarily makes sure that particular IT personnel handle specific issues to guarantee and maintain data quality, privacy, and access issues. “Data governance is an overall business management issue,” Dyche says. “Data management is an IT issue. It’s ensuring that the proper people are tasked with dataspecific jobs and not roving linebackers who address an issue when they have a free minute.” Dyche says it remains one of the biggest obtacles to current MDM adoption. “We’ll have clients ask us to spend a day explaining data governance to them, and we’ll show up expecting to formalize the decision-making processes around data,” she says. “Instead, they want to know how their metadata repository should be accessed and updated by the IT department. There’s a great deal of confusion in the market, and it’s critical [that] companies understand and define the differences between the two.” [ “MDM is essentially data warehousing on steroids.” ] Clean Brushes: Data Quality Another key to any MDM implementation, and the primary determinant of how much an MDM rollout will cost, is the underlying data quality and integration tool sets. The installation of enterprise information integration (EII) and operational data stores means the company has laid a firm foundation for MDM, says Ray Wang, principal analyst of enterprise applications at www.destinationCRM.com Forrester Research. “The beauty of the MDM hub approach is that many organizations already have the pieces in place,” he says. “They just need to find a way to pull it together.” Depending on the level of preparedness, a company could spend up to $5 million for licenses and implementation services for an MDM implementation, and spend anywhere from a year to 36 months rolling out the software, Wang says, though that figure can drop to as little as six months for a wellprepped company. “MDM is essentially data warehousing on steroids,” Kobielus says, and companies that have taken the time to embed data quality practices and data governance workflows have a head start. “It’s just like the old saying,” Kobielus says. “‘Dirty data in means dirty data out.’ Without data quality, it’s not MDM, it’s Steven Colbert: ‘There’s a truthiness there, but I wouldn’t trust that truthiness.’” Before pursuing MDM a company must establish data governance processes and technology safeguards across the enterprise, because “departments that have been operating independently of each other must operate in unison for the greater good of the company’s data CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2008 41 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2008

CRM - January 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Facebook's About-Face On the Scene: Oracle OpenWorld 2007 CRM Market Set to Double Customers, Meet your Makers Required Reading Oh, Behave! Fine-Tuning the Channel Listen Up! The Master Piece Flying High on Customer Service Let's Get Digital The Big Rigs Get Revved Up Putting Asia in Your Pocket Secret of My Success Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - January 2008

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