Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

Overcoming the IT and Business Constraints

In prior chapters, we have talked about how a successful MDM practice will often require cultural and political change across the IT and business functions to enable the cross-functional collaboration and investment required for a robust MDM model. We have mentioned that an MDM initiative should not be launched as an IT project bound by fixed time and delivery expectations, and that IT needs to break out of its traditional box in terms of how IT can help enable MDM. We have also emphasized how the business team needs to commit to the support of data steward resources and a quality culture.

It's actually to an IT organization's advantage to stimulate and support more responsibility and accountability in the business with regard to data management, data access, and governance because most of the data context and data quality issues are tied to business practices. Supporting more business-driven governance and front-end data management is an opportunity to enable more support and control where many of the root problems exist. It's also to the advantage of the business organizations to have more responsibility and accountability so that they can become more connected to the fitness and governance of their data, have more influence on quality control, and drive a more direct link between their operational and analytical data needs.

The difficulty is getting IT and the business to fully appreciate these advantages and develop a more collaborative ...