Given One More Chance….
How often do you look at your MDM solution architecture and say – Given another chance, I would have done it in a completely different way.
During MDM implementations, often these words are heard when the system is built in certain ways which does not comply with new requirements MDM system has to meet. The other reasons could be when master data entities are modeled and extended in ways which causes fetching of information rather tedious, and in some cases extremely difficult.
MDM Architectural designs have a tendency to grow beyond the original scope as the implementation uncovers new challenges. Not having a long standing vision of what you are building can cause severe troubles at the later phases of the project.
Quite surprisingly, I often hear customers looking for chances to re-institute their MDM effort because they failed to realize the importance of data quality. They fail to do an upfront, pro-active data profiling, data cleansing and data standardization work which are backbones of MDM.
Unfortunately, many organizations start recognizing this problem after few months into the project. This late realization happens because of many reasons. Not being able to carry out effective data matching process to identify duplicate records, missing and incorrect information in downstream applications, just to name a few.
I often hear customer say – if we had a chance, we would go back and rethink our strategy of data cleansing, data quality control and data standardization.
This delay in realizing the importance of creating quality data for MDM effort only causes more heartache simply because you spent all your money and effort and created a system which is nothing better than the dirty data you already have elsewhere in your organization.
Improving the quality of your data is the best thing. And MDM helps you manage your core information efficiently. When these two are combined, you will reap big benefits. Just make sure you do them in right order, because you will probably be given only one chance.
What was your – ‘Give me one more chance’ moments? Please share them via comments.
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Hi Prash. A few years ago I had the chance of redesigning a solution within the public transit industry. Given that second chance I used three concepts I haven’t regretted:
• Using an industry conceptual data model. Good people had already found the optimal solution for many issues we couldn’t have figured out up front our selves.
• Having an “unknown” master data record (temporary) referred to by transactions (typically sensor data) with not matching master data elements instead of excluding such transactions as a whole.
• Where ever possible using relevant external reference data for describing party, location and product master data.