Andrew WhiteThe second day of our MDM Summit carried on as day 1 had ended – lots of great user interaction. Another fruitful dialog led me to think about another aspect of MDM that has not been that widely talked about, that being business rules and the management of business rules. In a user roundtable discussion someone caused a bit of a stir by asking of the other users, “where do we master the business rules in our systems?” MDM needs business rules for sure, and most technologies related to MDM talk about rules of various kinds, in the context of those applications. But the angle of the question was really focused on mastering and governing business rules for reuse – an MDM idea.
We have business rules all across the IT stack; from inside ETL tools to manage how data is mapped and moved, to business applications to control how data is processed, even to within a data services environment that operates system wide. We did not host a session at the Gartner MDM Summit on business rules, yet there were many sessions where speakers drilled down on the existence and use of business rules. Ted Friedman talked about rules in his data quality session (on Monday in fact); Debbie Wilson talks tomorrow about business rules in her Procurement MDM presentation and how they help buyers automate managing and cleaning up procurement oriented master data. Deb Logan and I talked about business rules in our governance session today; and tomorrow Mark Beyer and Michael Blechar talk about business and data services rules when they talk about SOA, data services, and metadata management. But, where are the business rules engine vendors – and don’t they have an MDM-like role to play in the emerging business process platform? I would guess yes…
As I said a few times at the Summit, we have just spend 20 years building many tall, thick-walled vertical silos oriented around business applications and business intelligence with data stuck firmly inside those silos. We are just starting on a journey where we will spend the next 20 years throwing that out (as a design concept) for a new set of horizontal silos. BPM will be one large common discipline across the business; MDM will be another. Perhaps Business Rules Management will be another…
What do you think? Too complex? Too many different requirements and degrees of granularity? I don’t think we are their yet for MDM, but maybe soon?
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Category: Business Rules MDM Summit Tags: Business Rules, MDM Summit
