Andrew White

Well, it’s over!  I am on the plane on my way home.  Hope that everyone that came found some nuggets of information that can be useful back at the office, to get an MDM effort going, to put one back on track, or to execute more effectively.  Also hope that users found new contacts that will last months or longer; sharing ideas and finding new (high quality) acquaintances was cited as one of the key values of the Gartner events.

Kraft Foods Inc won the Gartner MDM Award for Excellence in MDM 2009.  BP and Merck were the other chosen finalists.  BP’s Andy Walker and Kraft’s Marcelo De Santis outdid themselves with two very good presentations to the audience on day 3.  The attendees voted; and Kraft won!  Both projects happened to be large, very complex, and ongoing.  Attendees noted how hard it was to pick a winner from the two stories; but Kraft took the prize (well, the lovely crystal trophy).

At the closing session the remaining Gartner analysts highlight some of the key take-aways and highlighted some of the ongoing areas of research.  I remember a few items of note:

• Process – MDM is more about process than technology; don’t over complicate the effort and focus on simplicity of process
• MDM, its governance interests, start at the point where a user’s finger touches the keyboard.  Data enters our business in many ways; and wherever that sensory device is located, on a PDA in the hands of a sales rep in outer Mongolia (does that still exist?) or from the automated file transfer from suppliers or other computers, “governance” has be present.
• BPM and MDM – Michael Blechar highlighted how process modeling and its impact, and value, to MDM, continue to emerge and that users should try to work on brining the two more closer together.
• Debbie Wilson highlighted how users continue to recognize, albeit from a small base historically, the value that MDM can bring to the business in terms of cost optimization.  BP and Kraft both included aspects of Supplier MDM and MDM of Purchased Part in their presentations.
• Kurt Schlegel explored the impact of analytical MDM on BI and Performance Management.  Kurt, along with John Van Decker, had presented on this topic during the event.  Several times “analytical MDM” had come up in other places during the event.  In the discussion of the Gartner MDM Hype Cycle, it was noted that this technology would be redundant within the next 2-5 years.  This seemed to create confusion,  Kurt highlighted how this refers to the mechanics within BI that handle the same tasks that operational MDM does; it is this “stuff” that will be, over time, redundant and hence target for elimination.  The business user work of doing “what ifs” on new hierarchy views of analytical data, and even the creation of new hierarchy, will persist, but this is not what we refer to as analytical MDM.  These capabilities are (or should be) provided by business applications, and they have their own evolutionary path.  . 

I am sure other memories will come back to me; I will try to post others as they come.

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