The Question of Data Ownership
,Who should own your customer data is perhaps the most controversial topic you can expect will emerge up front, and a pivotal question that you will need to address very tactfully because it's not really a question of who; rather, it's a question of how ownership will be handled.
There are many valid perspectives about data ownership that are likely to be brought to the table from the various line of business (LOB) organizations such as Sales, Finance, Marketing, Services, or IT that exist in most companies. The executive who will drive the MDM initiative, and potentially the data governance process, is probably already associated with one of these LOBs. But from an operational perspective, we know that a customer master environment will still typically consist of data attributes that originate from the source systems and transactional processes that various LOBs already own and manage, as they should. These LOBs will naturally be very sensitive and potentially resistant to any unwelcome or heavy-handed sense of new governance control meddling in their specific business processes and data management practices. Handling this scenario is where top-down and bottom-up data management approaches meet at the crossroads. These are not mutually exclusive approaches, and if not embraced properly, they will lead to ongoing division across the LOBs.
There are those who may argue that you need a single owner of the data for MDM to work. In some companies this may work, but in many companies a single owner approach will not work and is not even feasible due to the dependence on a variety of business functions to manage and contribute to various elements of the customer master data. To really get your arms around implementing a successful cross-functional Customer MDM initiative, the concept of ownership actually needs to be addressed from both a data and process perspective and should consider a delegated approach.
There are two basic questions to consider:
1. How does the responsibility for creating and maintaining data need to be coordinated across the LOB functions?
2. Who will own and manage the actual MDM practice and its core processes?
An objective examination of these questions will probably identify existing business and IT dynamics that need to be part of the equation and can either be leverage points or create inhibitors for launching an MDM initiative.
It is necessary to clearly understand these leverage points and inhibitors in order to develop an effective MDM approach, especially considering that as a business practice MDM will need to be distinguished from the traditional business practices and operational processes such as Order Management, Accounts Receivable, Opportunity Management, Account Management, Marketing, Service Delivery, and so on. Fully considering the MDM distinction and its relationship to these existing practices is essential to identifying the right MDM ownership dynamic, which will need to be reflected in the design of your data governance model. Doing so will set the foundation around how governance as an operating process—not just a decision-making body—can embrace data ownership and vice versa.