Preface

A steady movement toward Master Data Management (MDM) practices is underway. While managing data has always been a key component to a company's success, the emergence of MDM practices has provided a much more stable foundation for business intelligence (BI) and process improvement to build on. MDM also creates perhaps the most pervasive business and IT challenge that any data management initiative can present. MDM is a forcing function that, if implemented right, can uncover and enable correction of long-standing dirty laundry and systemic business problems related to a company's data and the associated processes.

In parallel, there are many excellent what and why focused books that are establishing the overall recognition, definition, and value proposition, which is driving companies to consider and position MDM initiatives in their business planning.

At the forefront of this movement, and typically the starting point for a company's MDM discipline, is the focus on the customer data domain, or what is commonly referred to as Customer MDM. Customer MDM is primarily aimed at achieving better cross-functional discipline, quality control, and standardization of a company's customer identity data in order to achieve an accurate and shared source of truth about an existing or prospective customer.

However, the dilemma with executing MDM is that it is an emerging discipline and there has been a general lack of any substantive and practical instruction for MDM planning and implementation as a business practice. In recognizing this gap, we have chosen to focus this book largely on the how and where aspects of planning, implementing, and supporting the business practice of Customer MDM from a program manager and data steward point of view. This book assumes you have already considered the overall merits for a Customer MDM initiative and are now looking for more tangible planning and implementation guidance. Or perhaps you haven't quite made that investment decision and are looking a bit deeper into the experiential and practical considerations of implementing MDM as part of your decision process. For either case, we believe this book will prove to be extremely valuable due to our “how and where” focus.

The key objectives of this book are:

• Convey practical guidance, foundation, and planning approaches geared toward the implementation of Customer MDM.
• Show readers how the comprehensive insights and techniques learned from the challenges, questions, advice, and instruction presented in this book apply to their internal scenarios.
• Provide context and content generic enough to apply to various architectures and customer master deployment strategies that commonly exist.
• Beyond just covering the fundamentals for planning and implementing Customer MDM, cover advanced practices key to achieving the extended value proposition from a Customer MDM initiative.

We have drawn this book's context largely from our own business and IT experiences and personal perspectives reflecting many years of work in the data management trenches. The insight and guidance we share reflects a wide spectrum of experience ranging from highly disparate system infrastructures where simply trying to get any edge with improving data quality and standardization was considered a victory, to the highly integrated infrastructure and challenges associated with data migration, process integration, and ongoing management of an enterprise-wide customer master and data hub model.

The target audiences for this book are the directors, managers, consultants, analysts, data stewards, and enterprise data and solution architects who are looking for practical guidance, options, and potential gotchas related to the planning, implementation, and maintenance practices associated with Customer MDM.

We have segmented this book into four parts that provide a logical order for this audience.