Andrew WhiteI received an email today from SupplyChainManagementReview that included am intriguing message, “The State of Data”. Enthused, I rapidly opened up the email. I could not read the thing on my PDA so I kept the email in my inbox to read when I had a free moment. Later I opened the email again hoping to find something exciting. There it was – a SAS advert:
Harnessing core data issues to improve organizational efficiency, profitability and competitive advantage. There is much ado about data quality in business today, and with good reason. Both IT managers and business decision makers alike are awakening not just to the direct costs of poor data quality, but more importantly, to the potential for true competitive advantage that superior data quality can yield.
Specifically, carefully planned and executed data quality and data integration initiatives can be integral to an organization’s ability to gain a 360-degree view of itself, its operations, and its customer base.
Well sure, that’s good stuff. But what such “data quality and data integration initiative” provides 360 degree view of such things? Why don’t people just call it out – you mean Master Data Management? Why do some folks cling to phrases that don’t actually say or mean anything specifically? Is MDM a data quality initiative? Sure, I’d go with that. Is MDM a data integration initiative? Sure, I’d go with that too. Is MDM a governance initiative? Sure – I’d even go with that. What I would say though is that “data quality”, and “data governance” and “data integration” lack the context I need to link to the business, and hence value the technology or discipline yields. I wish SAS would say it like it is: Try/start with MDM – it helps a lot of things
Category: Data Quality MDM SAS Dataflux Tags:
2 responses so far ↓
1 Steve Sarsfield February 12, 2010 at 4:56 pm
I’d say it this way, Andrew. Whenever you take on a project involving a lot of data (data intensive), pay attention to data quality. I wonder how often data quality is done for data quality’s sake, or whether more often its an important part of another major initiative. Data quality is just a part of getting your applications to be able to share data in an MDM implementation. Data quality may be the deciding factor as to whether business users like your CRM system. Data quality delivers on the promise in Supply Chain Management by letting you see accurate inventory levels. And so on…
With my apologies to BASF for stealing their tag-line – data quality doesn’t make the solutions, it makes the solutions better.
2 Prabir Majumder February 15, 2010 at 2:29 am
Here is my thought on this topic. MDM is getting wide spread adoption recently, and would continue to increase in near future. Initial MDM implementations focused on getting the things ready, like registry style and then hub style etc. Now MDM program started focusing on the next pain points that is Data Quality, and addressing DQ without DG and DI methodology is kind of short sighted, and thus all these got togher with MDM. Data Quality vendors have been there for long time (eg. Innovative Systems etc), but did not get that much visibility and attention as compared to today’s Information Management paradigm. This excited them and DQ Vendors have started into MDM programs, Data Flux et al earlier was focussing on DQ only, but now into MDM as well. So naturally these vendors would like to highlight DQ, DG and DI as important as MDM.