The year has started off with a bang.  Overall my 2011 was very similar to 2010 – very, very busy.  Inquiry load for MDM was much higher in 2011 though with our new hire in the MDM team, we were able to accommodate the increase without killing ourselves.  Travel is starting up this year with a blast – and it seems Master Data Management demand will only increase again.  I will be speaking about MDM and meeting with end users at BI summits (UK, Australia), BPM summits (UK, US), and that is along with our MDM summits (UK and US).  And we haven’t finished planning for the year yet, either.

I read lots of news papers and magazines, when I was not playing with the kids, or eating too much.  The Economist’s The World in 2012 had a story covering the mother of all MDM of Customer Data implementations.  In “India’s Identity Revolution” we hear how India is building out a platform to support real time identify management for all its citizens.  The focus is on sourcing social and other government services, and given the size of India’s population, this will be a very, very large implementation.  Maybe they could do with some help with MDM?

I will post a few other stories, the one’s I found most interesting, in the next few days.  But perhaps we can meet up at our upcoming MDM Summit in London.  I will be there all week (the BI summit is there earlier in the week).  The MDM Summit’s theme is “optimizing business outcomes with trusted master data” which seems very “in tune” with the current mixed economic situation.  MDM continues to amaze me.  Despite the complex political and fraught economic conditions, the market is going to continue to grow.  We put out a press release talking about the event that stated that “Worldwide master data management (MDM) software revenue will reach $1.9 billion in 2012, a 21 per cent increase from 2011”.  I will share our latest thinking on information governance, MDM of product data, and will share the key note with my colleague, John Radcliffe, to talk about MDM and cloud, social data and why “big data” isn’t big enough.

I was not able to attend this event in 2011 so I am looking forward to attending, and meeting those of you that can attend!

We have a number of case studies being worked on, and we also just extended the deadline for submitting your “MDM story” for consideration in the Gartner MDM Excellence Award.  You too can be richer and more famous than you are today!  Why not trot along to this location and send us your “story”.  You could be up on stage!  Go on, give it a go…

Looking forward to seeing you in LA!

For the last couple of years Chad presented his MDM market outlook during the breakfast session!  I managed to make it each time so far; and was astonished to note the number of end users sitting in this session outnumbers the number of vendors!  I always thought this topic was more interesting to vendors – but what do I know…

This year Chad will be presenting pre-event, along side an MDM tutorial that John Radcliffe and I will be doing.  Despite MDM’s age (about 6 years old) and hype (not much is more hyped in application land right now; maybe Cloud is the exception), we see a significant amount of client inquiries around the basics of MDM.  So this year we added a real, and I mean real, tutorial on MDM basics.  We will start with some pretty important definitions, and then expand from there.  It is a “must see” session for all newbies.

Are you going to the MDM event of the year?  When we launched our event it was the first true MDM event.  We never had a CDI event, or a PIM event.  We started with MDM – and it seems to have been the right move.  As with previous MDM events it seems we have a higher than normal number of business users as opposed to IT users) than with many other Gartner summits.  This is a reflection of the importance of MDM to business; and also highlights that a notable number of firms bring their MDM teams to our Summit.

Our agenda is – as usual – broad and deep.  We cover many topics – I don’t have to repeat them here – you can see form the agenda.  It is the only event I know of where the content is targeted, oriented, specific, to MDM.  This is not a BI event, or a SOA event, or an architecture event, or a governance of information event, or an industry event.  This is first and foremost an MDM event, where all those other topics are organized for you.

I hope you take the time to stop by and say, “hello”.  Maybe you want a 1-1 with me or any of the team: Debbie Wilson will be focusing on helping clients reduce operational procurement costs (hot in this climate), and Ted Friedman, as usual, will be talking about data quality and its role in MDM.  I will be there – with a host of other analysts, talking MDM for a couple of days.  Should be fun.

Preparations this week focused on getting our last presentations into our editing machine such that they can be formatted, made consistent, and cleaned up for public consumption.  Once the presentations are completed we then begin the slow process if distilling from the key messages, and creating a body of work that is to be published over the next couple of quarters.  Our Summits force us to put on paper all the good, new ideas and content that we have explored with users recently that has not hitherto been published.  These Summits, though a lot of work, are a great way to keep forcing our brains to dump content onto paper, thus freeing up more space for the next set of client interactions.

I had some interesting inquiries this week.  Here is a smattering of the more notable:

On Monday I had a real interesting call with a large industrial end user client that wanted to explore options for – wait for it – “cloud based MDM”!  Well, I knew I was in for an exciting conversation already since that is an odd topic.  I have blogged on this before(SaaS moves the process boundary, does not necessarily change the process, and can make integration of master data more complex); there are not real cloud based MDM offerings today, and really only a very small handful of end users have asked about this – more for interest than anything else.  Only one serious vendor has talked to me about this opportunity – and a credible vendor at that.  But, as I have said before, this is a complex topic.  On the one hand it makes sense that aspects, even all of MDM, should/could go outside the firewall, but the costs to move to that state increase for each and every object.  Those costs relate to integration, synchronization, management and so on.  Application infrastructure gets more complex as a result – until and if enough master data exists outside the firewall at which point the costs, and complexity, fall.  But there must be a tipping point at which this takes place.  Question is – which industry, which business processes, and which master data, are close to that tipping point?  

On Tuesday I had a real good call with an energy user.  This was a large organization with a strong IT shop; I spoke with several senior architecture folks were trying to invigorate their overall information management (IM) strategy.  They knew that MDM played a role in overall IM but they were not totally clear what the relationship was; and they also had an issue with “getting started” – how could they get interest from the business to help them with their IM strategy?  We explored MDM and its connections to IM, as well as to Business Intelligence and Business Applications, and very quickly the client realize that MDM is a great place to start their IM invigoration efforts!  I suspect that I will be talking with them a few times in the next few months to help guide them through their MDM launch.

On Wednesday I presented on MDM vendors to our MDM Special Interest Group (SIG) that is part of our EXP program’s Best Practice Council.  I highlighted the lenses through which we look at the MDM landscape (data domain, use cases, industries) and then talked about how the vendors align both in terms of capability, versus direction.  Many vendors are “good” at one thing/area, and have plans to be “good” at many others.

On Thursday I had a call with an end user firm that I know very well.  In a previous life I worked for an organization that had a business relationship with this client, so I knew something about their business.  They are in consumer goods/fine chemical industry segment, and they are struggling with one aspect of MDM – that being the link between MDM and product design/development, clinical trials, and operations/manufacturing.  The client has a lot of experience with operational MDM for traditional objects, such as customer and product, but this aspect of MDM was more focused on multi-enterprise considerations of sharing complex and confidential information that drive product design, development and acceptance.  

On Friday I joined one of our more interesting virtual research communities (B2B) that span several other formal communities, to explore how business to business is evolving.  My interests, including Supply Chain Management (SCM), concerned both the drivers for why business processes are moving outside the firewall, and with Master Data Management (MDM), what are the barriers and inhibitors to that movement. By exploring one specific phenomenon, related to e-Invoicing, we concluded that we need to identify scenarios by which users can evaluate a longer term B2B strategy.  You might not see the connection – between e-Invoicing and long term B2B strategy – but it is there.  More on this later…

So it was a great week – brimming with client interaction, and research production.  Time for a rest, and a cold one.  Have a good weekend.

I sat down with a large business applications vendor that sells to retailers and manufactures yesterday, to get an update on their “multi-channel” strategy.  Multi-channel, or as we are increasingly calling it, “multicommerce”, represent the complexity in a firm that exists when that firm interacts with its customers (or partners) across multiple channels using different methods.  For retailers, this can include store, direct, web, catalog, and so on.  For many retailers these channels are not all natively developed businesses, but some are acquired over time by the absorption of a smaller, niche competitor.  It is very common in fact to find a retailer with all manner of complex business applications systems loosely integrated in an attempt to align data and processes across channels.  The fact is that much of this integration is traditional (unchanged in design or structure for the last 8+ years), weak, and now overly expensive to maintain.  The result is often experienced by you and me: we can purchase items from one channel and not return it via another; we can place an order via one channel and experience unrelated customer service on another.  

The briefing was very interesting and the focus was more on how this vendor was helping retailers with “multi-channel planning”; how to aggregated forecasts and planning information across multiple channels in one holistic process.  I asked of the vendor, what they do to help the retailer integrate the underlying transaction and master data across the different channels. 

The response was a very bland “same old thing” answer that talks about “integration the way we have been doing it for years”.  This particular vendor does not “get” MDM, or at least does not relate publicly the connection between this latest attempt to unify single view of master data (like product, customer, location, channel, price) and how it will significantly reduce the costs of integration associated with managing duplicate and redundant and inaccurate master data.  

This is a great shame, in my view.  The retailers themselves are not collectively thought of as visionaries when it comes to MDM – though I met two such rare visionaries at our recent MDM Summit.  With the majority of retailers not understanding what MDM should be to their business, and with vendors selling into retailers not really “getting it”, the result will be slow adoption and apathy: not a recipe for significant improvement in retail performance.

Have you seen some good examples of MDM being applied in retail?  Do you think your examples are isolated?  Do you agree retailers are taking too long, in general, to get to grips with their master data? 

The users that attended the summit were asked to vote for the speaker who’s MDM journey rated most highly when using Gartner’s seven building blocks for MDM as a framework: Vision, Strategy, Process, Metrics, Governance, Organization, and Technology.  At the close of the event we announced the winner – Johnson and Johnson Healthcare Systems.  

Attendees commented on how J&J had effectively taken an enterprise wide view of MDM, and how the business had clearly been involved and led much of the effort.  Governance, business case justification, and IT alignment with business were cited as valuable reason’s why attendees had given the nod to J&J.

Charles Bloodworth was gracious enough to join us on stage to receive the award, and hopefully he can take it back to his office and show off the award to the entire hard working team at J&J.  Very many congratulations to Charles and the team – they deserve it!

We have business rules all across the IT stack; from inside ETL tools to manage how data is mapped and moved, to business applications to control how data is processed, even to within a data services environment that operates system wide.  We did not host a session at the Gartner MDM Summit on business rules, yet there were many sessions where speakers drilled down on the existence and use of business rules.  Ted Friedman talked about rules in his data quality session (on Monday in fact); Debbie Wilson talks tomorrow about business rules in her Procurement MDM presentation and how they help buyers automate managing and cleaning up procurement oriented master data.   Deb Logan and I talked about business rules in our governance session today; and tomorrow Mark Beyer and Michael Blechar talk about business and data services rules when they talk about SOA, data services, and metadata management.  But, where are the business rules engine vendors – and don’t they have an MDM-like role to play in the emerging business process platform?  I would guess yes… 

As I said a few times at the Summit, we have just spend 20 years building many tall, thick-walled vertical silos oriented around business applications and business intelligence with data stuck firmly inside those silos.  We are just starting on a journey where we will spend the next 20 years throwing that out (as a design concept) for a new set of horizontal silos.  BPM will be one large common discipline across the business; MDM will be another.  Perhaps Business Rules Management will be another…

What do you think?  Too complex?  Too many different requirements and degrees of granularity?  I don’t think we are their yet for MDM, but maybe soon?

We had a great first day!  The attendance at the event was very good indeed; the opening session was packed.  Despite the economic slow down and noticeable number of cancellations more users attended the event than last year which is testament to the importance of MDM – in touch times as well as good times.

The highlight for me during day 1 was our Governance Analyst Round Table.  I was lucky enough to sit with a number of  IT and business users who shared their ideas, issues, and questions (un-accosted by vendors) concerning the governance of master data.  The big take away for me, and this was reinforced by several other comments during day 1, is that before master data governance should be addressed; MDM has to be connected to the business.

Several users described situations where they were struggling to get governance off the ground, or keeping the business focused on governance once the process had been put in place.  The users who cited strong business involvement in MDM seemed to experience a far higher success rate in launching and sustaining governance efforts.  It seemed a good “take away” that, for governance of master data to work effectively, and to be sustained, it should not be addressed unless there is sufficient business involvement in MDM.