This chapter introduces master data management (MDM) and business process management (BPM). It describes the synergistic value that is derived from aligning these two often separate initiatives.

Organizations should use the free BPM Express supporting program entitlements that are available with MDM to build data stewardship processes to enforcing data quality policies. Broader enterprise processes (such as customer on-boarding) should use MDM to assure that decision makers have the most accurate, comprehensive, and timely information available. The remainder of this book explores the technical considerations and implementation standard practices that organizations can use to realize the benefits and value of these initiatives.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Master data is the one true source of data about customers, patients, suppliers, partners, products, materials, employees, accounts, and other critical entities. It is the basis for the high-value, core information that is used to support critical business processes across the enterprise. It is also at the heart of every business transaction, application, report, and decision.

Organizations hold and replicate master data across many different applications and customer touch points, such as order processing, customer service, and reporting systems. However, many of these source systems create, update, and maintain the data in their own unique way, typically resulting in a lack of consistency among them. Critical data elements might be missing, incomplete, duplicated, or otherwise inconsistent. With no single, unified, and accurate “version of truth” about the business, organizations miss opportunities to increase revenues, use a competitive advantage, and reduce costs. Critical business processes are hampered by incorrect data that can lead to poor decisions and result in poor business outcomes.

Regardless of how good the quality of the information is that a business maintains, the desired business goals cannot be realized if the main business processes have the following characteristics:

Many companies have deployed MDM strategies to resolve the problem of inconsistent data. MDM is a discipline that provides a single, unified, and trusted view of master data entities for any user or application. From a technical perspective, MDM is a set of software solutions that manage the creation, governance, delivery, and use of master data across the organization.

MDM connects all the information that was gathered about a particular entity or event from all the enterprise systems to form a more complete view of that entity or event to enable an understanding of its true value. MDM also provides mechanisms and governance for consistent use of master data across the organization. As a result, MDM enables better business processes.

IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management creates trusted views of data assets and elevates the effectiveness of an organization’s most important business processes and applications. It improves business results, lowers costs, reduces risk, and enables strategic agility to meet current and future business needs.

The IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management platform provides the assurance that enterprise master data is accurate, valid, relevant, and timely, and it can be trusted. InfoSphere MDM provides trust through its own data governance and stewardship processes for continuous enforcement of data quality, ensuring that business process requirements are satisfied. MDM and BPM are a mix of technology and methodology that enable organizations to improve process performance through better management and governance.

IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management offers organizations the following advantages:

Organizations use business processes to define the execution and management of their day-to-day business operations. BPM applications provide organizations the ability to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of those business operations. From this information, business processes can be easily changed by using the agile development capabilities of BPM to improve operational throughput and quality and to reduce cost. This approach supports an ongoing transformation effort to achieve continuous improvements in vital business processes, which can lead to continuous improvements in the business results.

Using BPM to improve business processes is a critical component for the continued success of businesses. BPM can also satisfy the requirement that these processes be agile enough to adapt to organizational changes, provide a rich user experience, be open to existing data systems, and provide visibility into process and individual performance.

BPM methodologies, supported by a business process management system (BPMS) allow for the rapid creation of value-centric process solutions with a dramatically reduced time to return on investment (ROI). When implemented, these processes are more easily modified to adapt to change, whether as a result of market conditions, regulations, or strategic shifts in corporate goals. By abstracting the business process logic and rules from traditional applications and services layers into business processes, the reuse and efficiency of IT resources increases. Business key performance indicators (KPIs) and data governance metrics, intrinsically provided by process solutions that are implemented by a BPMS, prove the effectiveness of process improvements, allowing businesses to better prioritize their IT Initiatives.

Many of the benefits of BPM are realized during an enterprise’s first process implementation, such as an IBM led Quick Win Pilot (QWP). QWP is a 12-week services offering that achieves only a limited production release. It often creates a chain reaction of process-oriented adjustments that allow businesses to achieve dramatic improvements. Often only the degree to which senior business and technical leaders can transform their IT and the business operation dictates how these process successes can be scaled into BPM programs that support and drive corporate initiatives. Such initiatives include improved product quality, reduced time-to-market, expanded markets, increased customer satisfaction, and improved profit margins.

Organizations are looking to transform their business. To fully realize that goal, they must bring their MDM and BPM projects closer together. Aligning the priorities, goals, requirements, milestones, and stakeholders of these often separate teams affords significant benefit to each team, and the organization and its employees benefit.

When organizations align their MDM and BPM projects, they maximize the value of each solution. Many analysts recommend that clients and vendors adopt a strategy that supports this aligned approach. As a result, IBM includes BPM Express in the IBM InfoSphere MDM product as a platform to support process-oriented data stewardship. In addition, IBM provides the InfoSphere MDM Application Toolkit for BPM that enables organizations to use InfoSphere MDM as a service from BPM. It simplifies the development of MDM-powered enterprise processes such as customer onboarding and order to cash.

The number of joint MDM and BPM projects is anticipated to grow at a considerable rate in the upcoming years. Despite IBM and IBM Business Partners having deep competencies in these technologies, the ability to successfully implement these joint patterns requires some level of cross-training and a new perspective.

By aligning MDM and BPM, high-performance, agile business processes can use trusted and accurate information to improve performance, bringing trusted data to processes and more agility to data stewardship. For the key business drivers and value propositions to align MDM and BPM projects, see the white paper, Transforming business processes by aligning BPM and MDM, at:

MDM and BPM intersect or align at three points as illustrated in Figure 1-1.

The points at which MDM and BPM intersect are called patterns. MDM and BPM have the following patterns:

After an organization identifies its, the organization must aggregate it to link and resolve duplicates and to ensure that processes are not creating duplicates. The Master Data Creation process calls for master data to be added to the MDM hub. In this pattern, customer onboarding, account creation, vendor onboarding, and other typical business processes push the master data that they author into MDM and search MDM to update existing master data. Probabilistic, deterministic, and other automated entity consolidation techniques are applied to resolve the master data into the single accurate version of the truth.

Master data is created for use within business process. Business process decisions that use accurate data are more productive and efficient. Consider the following example where a business process does not use accurate data.

John’s business recently moved. When he places an order with the call center representative (Billy), John is not found by his address nor his home phone number. The CRM system creates an unwanted duplicate account. John expects this purchase to promote him to a higher class of service that includes free shipping.

John is confused when he sees that his invoice has a shipping charge. He calls back into customer service where, after some investigate, Sue finds two accounts for John with the same cell phone number. Sue attempts to resolve the issue: updating the contact information for the original account and deactivating the duplicate account. Sue must manually upgrade John’s class of service, and his recent purchase history is orphaned from this account.

Every process uses data. Whether data comes from various enterprise systems or one application, it must be accurate and trusted before it can be used. Whether human or automated, decisions are only as good as the information available at the time they are made. MDM ensures that accurate, trusted master data is available to the process decisions that need it.

Creating master data and using it within business processes are the two primary points where MDM and BPM intersect within a business. In some scenarios, newly created master data must have additional assurances applied before business users can have confidence in the master data.

This confidence can be required for consumption within their business processes, as illustrated in Figure 1-2.

Master data governance provides business owners assurances that master data is a trusted asset that is ready for use within their business processes. Consuming processes have requirements that master data must comply with. These consumption-centric master data requirements can include attribute validation requirements that are associated with the completeness of a record, specific attribute values, and code table validation. Master data governance provides the capabilities that are necessary to administer and monitor these requirements as policies. Using a master data governance process to enforce these policies provides the assurances to business owners that master data is not only accurate but also supports their usage requirements. BPM Express, which is the MDM supporting program, is the platform for implementing this process-oriented data stewardship.

Figure 1-3 shows the master data governance process to enforce these policies. This process include policy administration, policy monitoring, and policy enforcement.