I did a joint customer call today with a colleague of mine, Ted Friedman. Ted is our main man in “data quality” world and as you can imagine, Ted does a lot of MDM related inquiries with customers since you can’t sustain MDM without the right dose of data quality. Well, we were speaking with a client – and it was a typical situation. Here was the original question: “we need to clean up and standardize our data describing parts and products – how can we do this?” We started by exploring what the background issue was – and this is what we heard.
“We had an ERP (think large packaged business application) migration program 18 months ago or so, and we decided to add an MDM strategy. The MDM part fell away and was not followed through though the ERP migration was a success. However, now we have no formal process for assuring that data in our systems is clean, consistent, and accurate. Now we have business problems that are surfacing since the data is not consistent and business processes are not producing the behavior or results we expect.”
No kidding.
The choices the client faces are difficult:
- Throw some data quality tools at the data as needed to clean what is dirty, and treat this is a periodic, or series of “one off” exercises to clean up the stuff
- Use an external service provider on-demand to clean and keep clean the data and provide enriched data services
- Build out a solution (people, and process, and technology), that sustains a formal process to assure data consistency and quality (akin to what the MDM program would have done).
The point from the conversation that was most ironic for me was this. We talked about what happened to the MDM program and the efforts to establish “governance”, and one of the IT folks on the call said, “Yes, the (business) users subverted that effort [and now look at the mess we are all in].”
I thought this was weird. Here was “IT” knowing what needed to have been done, criticizing the business for doing the minimum that they needed – at the time. I would posit that to get ERP up and running, you don’t need to establish a data governance program! By “running” I mean operating but not for any substantial period of time. However, the ERP system will not support the business requirements or deliver the value it was supposed to over any period of time if data governance (spanning master data as well as other data inside and outside of ERP) is not stood up. The business did not “subvert” the program; they probably didn’t think they needed it; and saw no direct value from it. “ERP” was the goal, and now everyone has to live with the consequences.
Why is it that so many end users find themselves in this situation?