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« Survey Finds Open Source Wide, Not Deep, at Data Sites | Main | Who's What: Among BI Vendors » October 29, 2007World's Biggest Time Waster: Reconciliation
While at Teradata Partners, I had the chance to catch up with Claudia Imhoff, one of the leading thinkers and voices in the business intelligence and data warehouse space. At a well-attended session at Teradata, Claudia addressed an emerging topic with far greater implications to the enterprise than BI or data warehousing alone -- master data management, or MDM. "Master data management is not a data warehousing project," Claudia emphasized. "However, many master data management projects get started by the BI people." MDM is "bigger than BI" because it "needs to be shared across all business operations," she explained. And it's "bigger than operations, so don't bury it under some application monitor." MDM is defined as "a set of disciplines, applications and technologies for harmonizing and managing the system of record and system of entry for the data and metadata associated with the key business entities of an organization." The good news about MDM, Claudia added, is that while it's by and for the enterprise, it doesn't need to include every piece of data out there. MDM is about capturing selective data -- reference data about the organization's core business entities -- people (customers, employees), things (products, finances), places (regions), and other key entities. "If you set out thinking,'I'm going to integrate all our customer data,'" don't do that," Claudia advised. "You'll never get there." What's the benefit of MDM? Time and productivity, Claudia explains. "Reconciliation is the biggest waste of time out there today. It's the biggest drain on productivity I've ever seen. Two departments heads will have to sit down and bring two sets of data into line -- 'Why don't your numbers match my numbers?'" Worse yet, nobody has ever tried to measure the time loss spent in reconciliation. "Enterprises spend enormous resources -- in time, money, and people -- doing reconciliation because of fractured master data." One challenge to corporate MDM efforts, however, is existing systems of entry (SOE) that have proliferated across the enterprise. "We'll never kill off all the systems of entry -- we have to be able to accept updates from those environments," Claudia said. "There are many reasons why the systems of entry can't be changed for today. They're either very old systems, or they're outsourced. If you use Salesforce.com, for example, you may have to leave the systems where they are." Posted by joemckendrick in Data Management | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
