Not MDM, Not Data Governance: Data Management.

photo by garybirnie

Has everyone forgotten database development fundamentals?

In the hubbub of MDM and data governance, everyone’s lost track of the necessity of data standards and practices. All too often when my team and I get involved with a data warehouse review or BI scorecard project, we confront inconsistent column names in tables, meaningless table names, and different representations of the same database object. It’s as though the concepts of naming conventions and value standards never existed.

And now the master data millennium has begun! Every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the software world is espousing the benefits of their software to support MDM. “We can store your reference list!” they say. “We can ensure that all values conform to the same rules!” “Look, every application tied to this database will use the same names!”

Unfortunately this isn’t master data management. It’s what people should have been doing all along, and it’s establishing data standards. It’s called data management.

It’s not sexy, it’s not business alignment, and it doesn’t require a lot of meetings. It’s not data governance. Instead, it’s the day-to-day management of detailed data, including the dirty work of establishing standards. Standardizing terms, values, and definitions means that as we move data around and between systems it’s consistent and meaningful. This is Information Technology 101. You can’t go to IT 301—jeez, you can’t graduate!—without data management. It’s just one of those fundamentals.

Comments

[Terri Rylander]

I read a lot of passion with a hint of underlying frustration in that post! Yes, you can't move on to the 12th grade if you haven't passed kindergarten.

Could you not lay out your roadmap to MDM where the "crawling" phase speaks to practical and consistent naming conventions?

[Karen Lopez]

I've felt the same way about Data Governance -- why does this have a separate buzzword. Shouldn't the governance be directly incorporated into our daily activities and not part of a separate group or set of policies?

[Evan Levy]

One of challenge with implementing data management (or data administration) is ensuring that the effort isn't perceived as an academic activity. All too often we see these initiatives focus on making data perfect rather than focusing on making data more usable.

Terry's idea is good -- approaching an MDM initiative by starting the data management tactics. We find a lot of our clients haven't had the cycles (or support) for implementing the necessary rigor associated with data management. With a new MDM initiative, suddenly the interest (and support) for addressing data management details is acceptable (and is actually adopted).