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But to deploy an enterprise initiative, one must understand who the key stakeholders are
within the organization; identify the individuals who will participate in the marketing,
education, championing, design, implementation and ongoing support of the program; and
delineate a process for identifying their needs and requirements for the purpose of
engineering a high quality master data asset. Before starting to build and configure the
master data management environment, team members should perform a number of tasks
specifically intended to:
• Identify the people in the organization that can benefit from MDM
• Collect and prioritize the data requirements that will drive the design and
development of the underlying MDM infrastructure
To do this, we must work with many stakeholders and align their expectations so that the
delivery of value from the maturing master data environment is correlated to milestones
along the project lifecycle. In this paper, we look at the different individual roles within the
organization that are associated with master data management – and examine what the
responsibilities and accountabilities are for each of these roles.
Because of this, communicating the value proposition for each stakeholder must focus on
improving each individual’s ability to effectively get his or her job done. This may
encompass a number of different aspects of productivity improvement, including, but not
limited to, improved data quality, reduction in operational complexity, simplification of the
design and implementation of applicationware, and ease of integration.
The second simplifying aspect is unique identification. Many applications frequently need
to uniquely identify entities. Unfortunately, the approaches that different application
programmers use to sort through the set of records that match against identifying
information are often diverse and inconsistent. Standardizing the process for unique
identification reduces the need for each application developer to design the process at the
application level, but instead allows the developer to reuse the capability engineered into
the master data environment.
This leads to the third simplifying aspect, which is the ability to define and standardize
many different kinds of master data services. Clearly defining the component services at
the core and the application layers provides a means for unifying the enterprise
application architecture, thereby freeing the developers to focus on supporting the
application business requirements.
Ease of Integration
Simplifying the core representative models and standardizing metadata and access
services makes it much easier for applications to talk to each other. Reducing complexity
and harmonizing metadata and exchange interfaces better enables applications to
conform to an enterprise application architecture driven by business expectations instead
of application functional needs.
Stakeholders
Who are the players in an MDM environment? There are many potential stakeholders
across the enterprise, including:
• Senior management
• Business clients
• Application owners
• Information architects
• Metadata analysts
• System developers
• Operations staff
Here we explore who the stakeholders are, what their expected participation should be
over the course of the development of the program.
Senior management also plays a special role in ensuring ongoing engagement by the rest
of the organization. Adopting a strategic view to oversee and communicate the long-term
value of the transition and migration should trump short-term tactical business initiatives.
In addition, senior managers should also prepare to adapt as responsibilities and
incentives change from focusing on the success of functional silos to organizational
success.
Business Clients
For each defined line of business, there are representative clients whose operations and
success rely on predictable high availability of application data. For the most part, unless
the business client is intricately involved in the underlying technology associated with the
business processes, the emphasis isn’t on how the system works, but rather that the
system works. Presuming that the data used within the existing business applications
meets the business users’ expectations, incorporating the business client’s data into a
master repository is only relevant to the business client if the process degrades data
usability.
However, the business client may derive value from improvements in data quality as a by-
product of data consolidation. Future application development will be improved when
facilitated through the service model that will support application integration with
enterprise master data services.
Supporting the business client implies a number of specific actions and responsibilities,
two of which are particularly relevant:
1. The MDM project team must capture and document the business client’s data
expectations and application service level expectations - and provide assurance
that those expectations will be monitored and met.
2. Since understanding the global picture of master object use, it is important for
the technical team to assess which data objects are used by the business
applications and how those objects are used. As subject matter experts, it is
imperative that the business clients participate in the business process modeling
and data requirements analysis process.
Application Owners
Thus, the application owner is a key stakeholder since the successful continued
predictable operation of the application relies on the reliability and quality of the master
repository. When identifying data requirements in preparation for developing a master
data model, it will be necessary to engage the application owner to ensure that
operational requirements are documented and incorporated into the model (and
component services) design.
Information Architects
Underlying any organizational information initiative is the need for information models in
an enterprise architecture. The models for master data objects must accommodate the
current needs of the existing applications while supporting the requirements for future
business changes. The information architects must collaborate to address both aspects of
application needs – and fold those needs into the data requirements process for the
underlying models and the representation framework that will be employed.
A success factor for MDM is its ubiquity; the value becomes apparent to the organization
as more lines of business participate, both as data suppliers and as master data
consumers. This suggests that MDM needs governance to encourage collaboration and
participation across the enterprise, but MDM also drives governance by providing a single
point of truth.
Ultimately, the use of the master repository as an acknowledged source of truth is driven
by transparent adherence to defined information policies that specify the acceptable
levels of data quality for shared information. MDM programs require some layer of
governance, which could mean:
Metadata Analysts
Metadata is a key component to both MDM and its underlying governance processes. As a
result, managing metadata must be closely linked to information and application
architecture as well as data governance. Managing all types of metadata (not just
technical or structural) will provide the “glue” to connect these together. In this
environment, metadata incorporates the consolidated view of the data elements and their
corresponding definitions, formats, sizes, structures, data domains, patterns, etc.
Metadata management also provides an excellent platform for metadata analysts to
actualize the value proposed by a comprehensive enterprise metadata repository.
System Developers
Aspects of performance and storage change as replicated data is absorbed into a core
master system. Again, the determination of the underlying architecture approach will
impact production systems as well as new development projects, and this approach will
change the way that the application framework uses the underlying data asset. In turn,
the system analysts must begin to reframe how they understand the way that master
data objects are used by the different applications and develop the services that interact
with the core master architecture from the point of view of the business application and
its associated clients.
Operations Staff
One of the hidden risks of moving towards a common repository for master data is the
fact that often, to get the job done, operations staff may need to bypass the standard
protocols for data access and modification. In fact, this approach to bypassing standard
interfaces is institutionalized in some organizations, with metrics associated with the
number of times that “fixes” or modifications are applied to data using direct access (e.g.,
updates via SQL) instead of going through the preferred channels.
Given the diversity of stakeholders and participants (and their differing requirements and
expectations) how can we balance each individual’s needs with the organization’s drivers
for master data integration? There are a number of techniques that can help in organizing
the business needs in a way that can, in turn, manage the initial and ongoing coordination
of the participants. These include:
The preliminary tasks prepare the team members for the first task of establishing the
feasibility of creating a master repository by evaluating the business’s data requirements.
This means that the rules for interaction must be changed from what might be considered
a confrontational engagement (in which participants vie for “definition dominance”) to a
collaborative engagement where the participants methodically articulate the concepts in
use by their constituencies. The process should detail where there is an overlap in
meaning, and where there is not, properly document what the differences are, and use this
as the starting point for collecting and collating master metadata. The processes and
procedures for collaborating on master metadata oversee the harmonization and
• I if the listed role is informed and kept up to date on the progress of the task.
There should only be one accountable role per task, meaning that each row has one and
only one A. An example is shown in Table 1
Management
Governance
Information
Application
Developers
Operations
Architects
Metadata
Business
Analysts
Owners
System
Clients
Staff
MDM
Data
Metadata Analysis I C C R R A C C
Developing the RACI matrix clarifies the roles and responsibilities as assigned to the
individuals within particular roles. The model is even used to validate that the right set of
personalities are identified for the set of processes.
In other words, implementation decisions based on technology constraints may alter the
way that the business process is performed within the context of the built application.
Eventually, the implementation is perceived as being equivalent to the business process.
But as an organization consolidates data into a master environment, it creates the
opportunity to truly understand what the business processes are and how they use the
different data objects.
Another way of looking at this is shown in Figure 1, in that the business policies are
translated into workflow processes to “get the job done.” These workflows drive the
requirements for building systems to implement the achievement of the goals directed by
the business policies. Ultimately, these workflows revolve around interactions with the
real world entities that facilitate business operations, such as customers, vendors,
products, locations, payment methods – and these are the same entities that emerge as
our master data objects! In fact, the exercise of modeling the business processes in
isolation from the way they are currently implemented will reveal knowledge (and perhaps
new opportunities) about coordination across the enterprise.
Therefore, another objective for MDM is the need for driving consensus regarding what
the master data objects are and how they are defined and used. Providing a common set
Data Governance
Data quality and data standards management are part of a much larger picture with
respect to oversight of master information. In the siloed environment, the responsibilities
– and ultimately the accountabilities – for ensuring that the data meets the quality
expectations of the client applications lie within the management of the corresponding
line of business. But for MDM, the process for master consolidation must incorporate the
union of all the data quality expectations and rules, and the resulting data quality
activities must ensure that all client applications’ needs are being met.
Because the master data is no longer “owned” by any one line of business, an enterprise
vision for information ownership should be in place to clarify accountability for all
organization data sets. Additionally, an enterprise governance program should be
instantiated to ensure compliance with ownership and stewardship policies. A data
governance program will encompass data quality, standards, accountability and audit and
control for reporting on policy compliance. The objective of data governance is to
establish the fact that master data is a core enterprise asset for which all staff members
must take accountability. Engage senior management stakeholders in creating a
functional oversight hierarchy for data governance, custody, and stewardship to make
sure that all stakeholder information requirements are being met, and that there are
procedures for remediating organizational data conflicts.
Summary
Setting the stage for assembling the right team for an MDM program involves determining
the best opportunities to socialize the internal value across the enterprise landscape,
performed along a number of avenues:
• Identifying the key stakeholders that will participate in the MDM program