Andrew WhiteI am just wrapping up a note on “Do Organizations with ERP “need” MDM?” We take many inquiries from users with large packaged application suites (some called ERP) and many such users are struggling with the MDM question. Interestingly, thought the question is simple, it turns out the answer is not as simple. It turns out that “ERP” is not a simple thing either; and many users have similar solutions but they don’t even call them, “ERP”.
My favorite peeve concerns how EVER business application should do a better job of managing its own data. Some of the data in applications is shared with other applications – and some of this is master data (such as product, customer, etc). However, these same applications use/publish/consume other data – that is specific to it. This is NOT master data; though some may call it “application master data” or as I would prefer to call it, “application specific data”. I am sure some of you fall into either (or other) camps. The problem is, if we call it “master data” it becomes very confusing: what does MDM concern itself with – managing for re-use “customer” across all applications, or managing all data in all applications? The former seems to be something we can do; the latter sounds like something we tried to do many times before and can never do well. Maybe the latter follows from the former. Anyway, I hope the note is popular. It is certainly a popular question.
On the political front, I seem to have struck a chord. On December 9th I commented on how Angela Merkel was saying things that were unhelpful with respect to long term safety of the Euro. It turns out that some Germans in her own parliament are saying the same things. Maybe with the right pressure Merkel will get a new vision. If not, I fear that the Euro will suffer, and as a result Europe’s economic situation will worsen. The article in the US print edition of the Financial Times today highlighted how the European Central Bank will, if things continue, become Europe’s (largest) “bad bank”. A “bad bank” is a concept that separates the high risk (even near worthless) assets (in this case bonds) from those that have a future. To think that a central bank could absorb “bad assets” to such a degree is hard to imagine – but it is good that some folks are talking about this risk. If any of us had more spine, we would actually say that some European countries are actually bankrupt! Already economists are looking at the value of debt that has to be covered in 2011. And it’s not a pretty picture.
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