• Kristian Steenstrup published a note, The Value of Asset Intelligence for Utilities, where Kristian explores “single view” of asset data.  IT systems can provide the support utilities needed to improve the approach to asset management from inception, construction or acquisition, through to performance and investment decisions. This research provides a full explanation of the emerging components of a complete asset management view.  This “360 degree” view of asset aligns nicely with our idea of a master data lifecycle.  Master data (of all kinds) experiences a life cycle that is unique; this is not the same as Information Lifecycle Management, which looks at the physical storage requirements for all data as it moves through a usage pattern.  Asset master lifecycle is unique in that is spans design, construction (two MDM use cases), as well as operations, and analytics (the other two MDM use cases). Utilities are well versed in this lifecycle concept so are in a position to lever MDM quickly.
• Jeff Woods published a note, How to Evaluate Your Vendor’s ERP Strategy, where Jeff provides a comprehensive framework to help you evaluate your vendor’s ERP strategy.  Most enterprises will be tied to their ERP vendors for more than 10 years. Therefore, it pays to make a fully informed decision about those vendors, beyond just functional fit, before you implement or engage in an expansion of your ERP project. This is particularly complex since what is meant by “ERP” has changed over the years.  The original concept was a specific application sported a  “single data model/single process model”.  Over time as those vendors grew in size, and acquired applications and application suites, “ERP vendors” now offer more of a heterogeneous landscape.  SAP and Oracle, the two largest “ERP vendors”, still offer an ERP option from old, but that is far less useful to the majority of users, that now focus on an “ERP strategy” which is “source as much stuff from one vendor”.  Whatever your ERP strategy, this research is great for scoping out the ERP footprint.
• Lastly, Mark Beyer and I wrote a note, The Emerging Vision for Data Services: Master Data and Content Management for SOA.  This is a very important note, because we have not written that much on the relationship between MDM (and Content Management, for that matter) and SOA and this is changing.  This note represents a core piece of research that explains why MDM needs SOA.  There is more to come on why SOA needs MDM.  This note explores the increasing first hand experience users are reporting when they try to create integration between MDM hubs and application oriented data that also stores master data.  Mark and I will be exploring this in more detail at our upcoming MDM summit (see below).

I hope you find the research helpful.  Let us know if you don’t, and why.

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I took a briefing from NRX last week, a very interesting vendor that has a specific focus: helping firms in capital/asset/construction intensive industries manage master data and content of assets in typically complex, heterogeneous IT environments.  These needs are common in capital/asset/construction industries such as oil and gas, utilities, energy, and even public sector, but the vendor also specializes in managing the semi and non machine readable data referred to as content.  For industries, governing and managing content and highly structured data in a uniform manner is already critical especially where compliance or regulation requires it.

During the briefing we compared notes on the size of the MDM market.  We had two different perspectives: Gartner reports frequently on “spend”, that is, what is actually being spent by end users.  Vendors of course are often more interested in understanding the potential spend, or the addressable market.  These are two different ways of measuring the market – and neither are enough, or right/wrong.

This dialog reminded me of a note I helped write recently that commented on a user survey we completed late in 2008, that sought to determine how adoption of Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is going.  EIM is a business oriented information strategy that is adopted when a firm decides to manage information as an asset for reuse.  EIM concerns only information that is determined to be important and valuable to the business (such as master data) so MDM is part of an EIM strategy; metadata is also a very important information asset that can be re-used, so metadata management can also be part of EIM also.  

However, just using or adopting MDM or metadata management does not mean that EIM is being achieved.  EIM is all about re-use; and so MDM and metadata management has to be used in a particular way: there is little point achieving a local “single view” of data in one application or one department, or on desktop.  

For MDM to be effective the discipline has to be, eventually, enterprise wide.  As such there is “bad spend”, that is money spent by the business on practices that do not contribute to the realization of EIM.  And there is “good spend”, that is money spent in the right way.  However, trying to understand the different, and report on it, is very hard to do.  The note, called How to Really Do the Five EIM-Related Things Everyone Else Just Thinks They’re Doing, concludes by saying that a the majority of spend on a range of information management technologies is “bad spend”.  It is spending that goes toward local use of technology, or toward an approach that is not bound to create the necessary building blocks for EIM.  Our survey’s were producing results that implied EIM was widely adopted and in hand: the reality is that if this were the case, MDM would not be so popular and I (and our team) would not be so busy!