Andrew WhiteI just got back from a week long trip “down under” to speak at our BIIM summit in Sydney, and I took a day or so in Melbourne and Canberra to meet some customers and users. This was off just coming off the back of a week long trip to the UK where I was supporting our MDM Summit in London, England. And as luck has it, I will be back in the UK in a couple of weeks to talk about MDM at our BPM Summit! So it’s been quite a busy month.
Australia was great! I loved Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney was a fresh, young place, with that amazing conflagration of east meets west cuisine. I was impressed with the friendly locals, and thought the standard of living was excellent, if expensive. I could certainly consider living there, or in Melbourne, that, as a city, seemed to have a little more character than Sydney. Canberra was very – public sector. What else is there in Canberra?
Master Data Management was well understood, and I got the feeling that many organizations are very practical when it comes to information governance and trying to increase business value from information. Big ideas like EIM were understood, but the practical side of the many conversations I had made me think that MDM was more realistic for many organizations, even if the same challenges surface around politics, lack of business driver (or clear line of sight to one), etc. My take-away from the BIIM summit was though the main marketing message and go to market material was around “BI”, there was a whole lot more “IM” going on. And a BI focus might make some users realize the focus is always downstream in the analytics area. I hope the next few years allow us to grow further the “IM” side of the equation.
The UK’s MDM Summit the week or two before was very busy too. I joined in with the BI Summit that preceded the MDM Summit. I actually presented a new pitch at the BI Summit – how to evolve information governance from MDM to broader EIM, including BI. The session was very well attended, and based on the four folks that came up to me afterward; I am hoping the scores from the session will be very good. I hope so – since I want to develop the content and good scores will allow us to focus on the material and further develop it.
Both events (BI and MDM) were larger than any previous events in Europe, so despite the economic noise and risk, interest in the two hot topics continues apace. There were lots of 1-1’s focused on information governance and “how to get started”, though there were also quiet a few MDM program leads that told of “somewhat lacking MDM programs that need to be re-invigorated”. Overall, what goes by the name, “MDM” seems a little all over the place. One user said to me, “we have had two silod MDM programs going on, different parts of our company, with different vendor offering. But business value remains hard to find. We need to “re do” MDM but we can’t use that name”. So there were really good, meaty inquiries to get stuck into.
Lastly, while I was away, my colleague Bill O’Kane quietly published a new piece of research that heralds our increasing focus on the consulting and services side of MDM. We have focused most of our research on the program management and technology side, but we are now trying to address parts of the consulting services side. Bill published a piece, Best Practices in MDM: How to Evaluate and Engage External Service Providers, which leverages some past research to help you determine how best to engage with 3rd party consulting companies to help with your MDM program. We hope to do more – perhaps an ESP guide for MDM would be useful. Let me know.
Category: External Service Providers (ESPs) Tags:
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1 Travel Notes – Gartner's BI and MDM Summits, London, UK, and … February 28, 2012 at 1:30 am
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