Konnichia mina-san! Wow, I feel awful, I haven’t updated in 2 whole days =(. Well, to make up for that, I’m going to do a SUPER-DELUXE post today ^__^

First of all, you might be wondering, “Where has Ame-chan been?” Well… Two days ago, I went into  Snow White mode and thought “Ame, your room is a MESS, let’s clean up!” So, two days later, my room is cleaned..and I remember..”OH NO! I FORGOT TO WRITE A BLOG ENTRY!” hehehe, gomenasai!

Everyone needs help with X-mas  presents nowadays! I mean, with the economy so suckish right now, inexpensive presents are a must! BUT you don’t want to give a Loli a CHEAP gift, right? Well, here’s an awesome list of great Japanese X-mas gifts!!!!!!!!!!

Moi Dix Mois Mousepad (sorry for the small pic)

2) Moi Dix Mois Mousepad:
OK, OK, so MAYBE I’m the only one that wants this…but maybe not! I really like it! And the price is an extra plus!

Jubilee!

3) Jubilee:
I think that EVERYONE should go buy Versailles’ newest album, Jubilee! This version comes with a DVD and LIMITED EDITION poster ^__^

Hello Kitty Headphones

4) Hello Kitty headphones
C’mon, haven’t you always wanted a pair of these? No? oh…well then..NEXT PRODUCT!

Hello Kitty Sushi Maker

5) Hello Kitty Sushi Maker!
Isn’t it adorable?!

Kimono Cell Phone Case

6) Kimono Cell Phone Pouch
Ok, I am buying this right now…It’s adorable!!! And what better way to carry your phone around?

Omanjyu Kawaii Plushies

7) Kawaii Omanjyu plushies
AH! They’re so cute I just wanna eat ‘em up! Hahaha, actually, I want to squeeze them, and LOOK, the bottom doubles as a screen cleaner!!

Hello Kitty Bento Box

8 ) Hello Kitty Bento Box
Use this to keep your Hello Kitty Sushi in!! Hahahha, I love Hello Kitty, can’t ya tell?

Lotte Glamatic Gum

9) Lotte Glamatic Gum
Chewing Gum! I bought some…SO GOOD! ^__^

Choclate Pocky

10) POCKY!
I love Love LOOOOOVE Pocky!!!! It’s one of the BEST desserts EVER! Well…maybe that’s an exaggeration…but it’s pretty darn good anyway!

CURE magazine

11) CURE magazine:
“An ultra hip, oversized J-rock magazine dedicated to avid fans of Japanese punk and gothic culture” KYA! I love this magazine! You should order it…now!

Kera Maniax

12) KERA Maniax
“Covering a variety of themes, from punk to Harajuku grunge to Goth-Loli” A magazine much like the GLB, but with wider (and in my opinion more harajuku) fashion sense.

Gothic and Lolita Bible

13) The Gothic and Lolita Bible
Last, but certainly not least, is the Gothic+Lolita bible. The PERFECT gift for any Lolita.

Germany’s smart meter law takes effect January 1^st.  Beginning then, all electricity meters on new construction and renovations – an estimated 5% of households per year – must be “smart” meters.  The problem is that the law itself defines “smart” only as “digital”, with no further specificity.  Most countries require that smart meters meet five needs: collect interval data, deliver it daily, have a disconnect switch, have a Home Area Network interface, and support two-way communications.

In a press interview, Annegret Agricola, Head of the Division of Energy Systems and Energy Services of the German Energy Agency (DENA) in Berlin, shed additional light on the German law.  She clarified that in Germany the intervals should be 15-minute, the data is to be collected “several” times per day, and consumers are to be able to view their data on line on a Web portal.  By the end of the year, time-of-use or other dynamic pricing options must be offered to consumers.  The German Federal Ministry of Environment estimates that such tariffs will result in usage reductions of 10 to 30 percent (likely during the high-priced periods).

Why does this matter?  To begin, Germany, at 223 million metric tons in 2001, was the sixth largest carbon emitter in the world after the United States (1565 mmt), China (832 mmt), Russia (440 mmt), Japan (316 mmt), and India (251 mmt).  As such, Germany is a key player in the fight against global warming.  In addition, Germany’s use of smart meter standards similar to those in the U.S. and elsewhere promotes international standards, which in turn reduce costs and improve functionality.

Germany’s initiative is a welcome sight.

A client asked me last week about what rate of duplicate data was “normal” in customer master data.

My initial answer was that, among companies that don’t have any formal master data management, data governance or data quality initiatives in place, duplication rates of 10%-30% (or more) are not uncommon.

When I was at D&B, we used to routinely see that level of duplication in client’s customer files.

In a study in the healthcare field, Children’s Medical Center Dallas engaged an outside firm to help clean up their duplicate data:

“Solving both the current and future problems around duplicate records helped Children’s improve the quality of patient care and increase physician acceptance of the new EHR. The duplicate record rate was initially reduced from 22.0% to 0.2% and five years later it remains an exceptionally low 0.14%. The 5 FTEs initially tasked with resolving duplicate records have been reduced to less than 1 FTE.”

“For the Children’s Medical Center, the results were heartening, not only from a care delivery standpoint but also because of the significant cost-savings that can be realized. A study conducted on Children’s data showed that on average, a duplicate medical record costs the organization more than $96.”

So it is possible to get the duplication rate down to really low levels through careful analysis and the application of the right tools, as part of an ongoing data governance program. Even the hospital above (and hospitals are usually not mentioned as practitioners of best practices) was able to maintain a duplication rate of only 0.14% after 5 years.

And there are very real costs to not de-duplicating your customer data.  Depending on the functional area (marketing, sales, finance, customer service, etc.) and the business activities you undertake, high levels of duplicate customer data can:

• annoy customers or undermine their confidence in your company,
• increase mailing costs,
• cause hundreds of hours of manual reconciliation of data,
• increase resistance to implementation of new systems,
• result in multiple sales people, sales teams or collectors calling on the same customer,
• etc.

The best studies I’ve seen of the cost of duplicate data have been in the healthcare industry. One study I saw said:

“According to Just Associates, the direct cost of leaving duplicates in an Master Patient Index database is anywhere from $20 per duplicate to several hundred dollars. The lower cost reflects the organization’s labor and supply costs to identify and fix the record while the higher expense reflects the costs of repeated diagnostic tests done on a patient whose previous medical records could not be located.

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) estimates that it costs between $10 and $20 per pair of duplicates to reconcile the records. If the records aren’t reconciled, however, the costs are even higher.”

Here are three more case studies backing up the range I quoted of 10%-30%:

• Once the analysis was complete, Sentara discovered they had a significant duplication rate, over 18%. They had attempted to address the duplication rate in the past through a remediation process, but due to either technology issues or because the cost of merging and cleaning up the duplicates across their many different systems was too high, they had not yet successfully reduced their duplication rate. Source: Initiate Systems success story

• Emerson Process Management faced a tremendous challenge four years ago in getting its CRM data in order: There were potentially 400 different master records for each customer, based on different locations or different functions associated with the client. “You have to begin to think about a customer as an organization you do business with that has a set of addresses tied to it,” says Nancy Rybeck, the data warehouse architect at Emerson who took charge of the cleanup. Working with Group 1, Rybeck analyzed the customer records for similarities and connections using everything from postal standards to D&B data, and managed to eliminate the 75 percent site-duplication rate the company suffered in its data. “That’s going to ripple through everything,” she says. Source: DestinationCRM.com

• Problem: Number of duplicate records: 20.9% of Utah Statewide Immunization Information System records. Impact of Problem: Difficult to find patients in system—key barrier to provider participation, risk of over-immunization—unable to find reliable patient record, cost of unnecessary immunizations, risk of adverse effects on patients. Source: health.utah.gov.

And here’s a good quote from a white paper titled “Data Quality and the Bottom Line” by The Data Warehousing Institute:

“Peter Harvey, CEO of Intellidyn, a marketing analytics firm, says that when his firm audits recently ‘cleaned’ customer files from clients, it finds that 5 percent of the file contains duplicate records. The duplication rate for untouched customer files can be 20 percent or more.”

Every organization will need its own metrics, but left unchecked, the duplication problem is a hidden cost that drags at your company, slowing down your processes and making your analyses less reliable.

If your sales analysis reports can’t be sure that there’s one and only one record for each of your largest customers, then the sales figures for those customers are probably not right. So the entire report becomes suspect at that point.

I’d like to end with a great quote on data quality by Ken Orr from the Cutter Consortium in “The Good, The Bad, and The Data Quality”:

“Ultimately, poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything.”

Please let us know what you think by commenting here.  We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on data quality and the issue of customer data duplication.

At breakfast this morning, I spoke to Bob Hormats, who is Hillary Clinton’s lieutenant at the State Department (officially “Under Secretary for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs”) about U.S. competitiveness. Today, the U.S. leads the world in Smart Grid technology, pulled along by visionary policymakers in California and Texas, and executed by hardware and software innovators from start-ups to giants.

That leadership is demonstrated in a plethora of Smart Grid, smart meter, dynamic pricing, smart town, PHEV charging, and other pilots – and rollouts to all customers in a handful of states of smart meters that enable large-scale dynamic pricing, remote connect/disconnect, power quality monitoring (voltage and outage), and interfaces to in-home displays, smart thermostats, and smart appliances.

Bob said, “America’s greatest strength is innovation and receptivity to new ideas. We attract the best and the brightest students and entrepreneurs from around the world and put them in places like Silicon Valley with its unique blend of cooperation and competitive spirit.” Visionaries going back to Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln highlighted America’s genius for creating new ideas and having an environment that accepts new people and new ideas. Smart Grid is a perfect example of that.

Bob spends a lot of his time in trade negotiations, working to protect the valuable intellectual property being created by Smart Grid and other companies. How important is this? As important as maintaining the lead in an intensely competitive international market for Smart Grid, having an estimated value of at least half a trillion dollars.

Utilities, regulators, and others like to ask how much smart meter system components cost. It’s a bit like asking how much does a car cost, especially as you get into the IT side of things.  Are we buying a Toyota Corolla or a Mercedes sedan?

Cost is always a tough question and best answered for a specific utility for a specific project. Having said that, there is one public cost point that I know of for MDMS costs, which is the IESO MDMS implementation in Canada. IBM announced that their five-year contract was approximately $45 million CDN, about $40 million US. This covers 4.5 million meters (so about $9 per meter) and is full turn-key, so it includes hardware, software, implementation, and operations for five years. Importantly, and perhaps affecting the cost, the IESO is providing MDM services for the entire Province of Ontario, which has 93 distribution utilities. Also, the IESO had to be sure its system could handle the many millions of data transactions occurring with AMI systems and utility systems every day, including real-time transactions.

For smaller implementations, surprisingly, the cost probably is not that different on a per meter basis, though it probably bottoms out around 5K meters.

Anyone looking at this issue should be sure to contact MDMS providers directly, including eMeter of course

When you are deduping, consolidating or doing identity resolution with party master data the elements that may be used includes names, postal addresses and places, phone numbers, national ID’s and eMail addresses.

Types of eMail addresses

In this post I will look closer into eMail addresses based on a general list of types of party master data.

You may divide eMail addresses into these types:

CONSUMER/CITIZEN:

This is a private eMail address belonging to an individual person.

Typical formats are myname@hotmail.com and nickname@gmail.com and name123@anymail.com

You may change your eMail address as a private person as time goes or have several such addresses at a time depending on your favourite providers of eMail services and other reasons to split your personality.

HOUSEHOLD:

A household/family may choose to have a shared eMail Address for private use.

Typical format will be xyz-family@anymail.com where the word family of course could be in a lot of different languages like famiglia-italiano@email.it

A special usage is the GROUP where two (or more) names are included like mary-and-john@anymail.com

EMPLOYEE:

This is the eMail address you are assigned as an employee (including owner) at a company.

Common formats are abc@company.com and name.name@company.com

When you change employer you also change eMail address and you may have several employers or other assignments at the same time. Also different formats like initials and full name may point the same inbox.

DEPARTMENT:

Here the eMail address is not pointed at a particular person but some sort of a team within a company.

Formats are like sales@company.com and salg@firma.dk and vertrieb@firma.de choosing the sales team in some different languages.

Some eMail are referring to a specific FUNCTION like webmaster@company.com

BUSINESS:

This is an eMail address for the entire company.

Most common formats are info@company.com and company@company.com

INVALID:

Often a field designed for an eMail address is populated with invalid values going from obvious wrong values like XXX to harder detectable syntax errors and not existing domains.

Real world duplication

Many online services are based on registration via an eMail address assuming that one eMail represents one real world entity which of course is not the case.

Even on a service like LinkedIn where you may attach several eMail addresses to one profile you do encounter persons with obvious duplicate profiles.

Multi-channel marketing and sales

An increasing number of organisations are doing both offline and online operations today and when building enterprise wide master data hubs the eMail address becomes an more and more important element in matching party master data.

In such matching activities the eMail address can not stand alone but must be combined with the other elements as names, postal addresses, phone numbers and national ID’s upon availability.

Success in automating such processes is based on advanced algorithms in flexible and configurable solutions.

Comment or eMail me

If you also have been battling here I will be glad to have your comments here or by mail. My mail is hlsgr@mail.tele.dk and hls@omikron.net and hls@locus.dk and hls@dmpartner.dk and nordic@omikron.net

I enjoyed the good-natured contest (i.e., a blog-bout) between Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen, Charles Blyth and Jim Harris. The contest was a Blogging Olympics of sorts, with the Great Britain, United States and Denmark competing for the Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals in an event called “Three Single Versions of a Shared Version of the Truth.”

I read all three posts, and the excellent comments on them, and I then voted for Charles Blyth.  Here’s why:

I worked as a Systems Programmer in the ’80s in the airline industry. Remarkable as it sounds, system programmers in each airline used to modify the IBM supplied Operating System, which was known as the Airline Control Program (ACP), later renamed as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF).  Could you imagine each business in the world modifying Windows today? I’m not talking about a configuration change, I’m talking about an Assembler code change to the internals of the operating system. The late ‘80s saw the development of Global “Computer Reservations Systems” (CRS systems) including AMADEUS and GALILEO.  I moved from Aer Lingus, a small Irish airline, to work in London on the British Airways systems, to enable the British Airways systems share information and communicate with the new Global CRS systems. I learnt very important lessons during those years.

1. The criticality of standards
2. The drive for interoperability of systems
3. The drive towards information sharing
4. The drive away from bespoke development

What has the above got to do with MDM and the single version of the truth?

In the 70’s and 80’s, each airline was “re-inventing” the wheel by taking the base IBM Operating System, and then changing it.  Each airline started with the same base, but then Darwin’s theory of evolution kicked in (as it always does in Bespoke development environments).  This worked fine as long as each airline effectively worked in a standalone manner, and connecting flights required passengers to re-check in with a different airline etc.  This model was blown away with the arrival of Global CRS systems. Interconnectivity of airline reservation systems became critical, and this required all airlines to adhere to common standards.

We are still in the bespoke era of Master Data Management.  This will continue for some time.  Breaking out of this mode will require a major breakthrough.  The human genome project, in which DNA is being ‘deciphered’ is one of the finest examples of how the “open source” model can bring greater benefit to all.   The equivalent within the Data world could be the opening up of proprietary data models.  IBM developed the Financial Services Data Model (FSDM).   The FSDM became an ‘overnight success’ when BASEL II arrived.  Those Financial Institutions that had adopted the FSDM were in a position to find the data required by the Regulators relatively easily.

Imagine a world in which the Financial Regulator(s) used the same Data Model as the Financial Organisations?

Naturally, such a model would not be set in stone.  There would be incremental improvements – with new versions published on a regular (perhaps  yearly, biannually, or maybe every 5 years).

Back to the great “Truth” debate.  Charle’s view most closely aligns with mine, and I particularly liked his reference to granularity – keep going till one reaches the lowest granularity required – remember, one can always summarise up, but one cannot take apart what has been summarised up.

Most importantly, I would like to thank Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen, Charles Blyth and Jim Harris for holding this debate.  Debates like this signal the beginning of the move towards a “Single Version of the Truth” – and has already led to a major step forward.  Dean Groves suggested on Henrik’s blog that the word “version” be changed to “vision” – Suddenly, we had agreement – We all aspire to a “Single VISION of the Truth”.

I look forward to many more debates of this nature.

You can see the results of the vote here

The Hub Designs Blog welcomes a guest post by Rob DuMoulin, an information architect with more than 26 years of IT experience, specializing in master data management, database administration and design, and business intelligence.

Most business intelligence architects are well versed in the value of the time dimension.

With query performance and the need to support complex analyses being the two most important considerations in BI, a flattened set of time dimensions provides a multitude of options to represent and standardize time with limited overhead.

It’s easy to see the value of having a flexible, consistent, and integrated representation of time when thinking of business activities. Aspects such as when a transaction or activity occurs in relationship to other transactions, activities, or even pre-defined thresholds form the basis of Business Process Management activities. And accounting departments group transactions into time periods every financial reporting period.

So, how valuable can this same time dimensions be to a Master Data Management solution? If you are well versed in MDM at this point, you’re probably saying “What you’ve talked about so far is useful for relating transactions but it doesn’t tie back to mastering business objects like customers, products, or locations”.

But remember that mastering those objects does require standardization during information acquisition and publishing and that the various inputs and outputs to an MDM system are often diverse. Also, don’t underestimate the value of mastering “Time Tables” themselves as a component in your MDM universe.

First, let’s define just what we mean by a set of time tables before we apply them to MDM. A typical implementation would have two distinct groups of tables to represent time: day, and time-of-day. At the lowest level of the day group is a day-level table with every imaginable way the business can identify a day, such as: by its day of year, week, month, quarter, advertising week (for retail), same day last year (in some special context), or special tags like holiday, weekend, season, positional sunrise/sunset times, or even astrological sign and full moon cycles. And that just covers the calendar view of the business. There is an equally important and extensive set of calendar hierarchies and attributes associated with the business fiscal reporting needs. Add to that every way you want to represent attributes like day of the week or month of the year (number, 3-letter abbreviation, full name) and ending up with over 100 attributes in the day-level table is not uncommon.

Related to the day-level table are hierarchy tables at levels such as: month, quarter, year (and their fiscal counterparts). Each of the hierarchy tables contains all the attributes that define that level and higher levels. For example, the calendar month table would contain attributes defining month of year, month of quarter, and month overall, in addition to quarter and year and all the ways to call the month. Primary keys for the higher level hierarchy tables, like month, would have child entries in the lower level tables, like day, for every entry that rolls into the higher level.

The same holds true for time of day, with hierarchies like hour, minute of hour, shift, peak time, off-peak time, and others.

Because all the higher-level attributes are repeated in the lower-levels, there is typically not a compelling need to join the two tables. The relationships are there for flexibility. Having the various hierarchy tables as stand-alone entities allows you to attach them to business tables at all of the levels you collect or report time values. These tables and hierarchy relationships allow you to easily merge data of different time grains.

The best thing about time is that time is constant. There are always sixty seconds to the minute, sixty minutes to the hour, twenty-four hours to the day (excluding Daylight Savings Time adjustments), seven days to the week, the number of days to the month is fixed, the number of days in a year is predictable. Except for adjustments to fiscal calendars and special events, most of the information related to time hierarchies is static.

BI uses these techniques to conform information allowing it to readily apply to many views of the business… which sounds a lot like the same business issues we try to solve when integrating data within an MDM solution.

Introducing a robust set of Master Time dimensions into an MDM architecture opens up flexibility in how you consolidate information and also how you can apply it to many business purposes. It’s a natural expansion of MDM to include a master version of the corporate calendar (particularly the fiscal calendar) using a common set of time-related identifiers complete with any time references relevant to business operations.

Please let us know what you think of mastering the Time dimension or other types of corporate reference data in the MDM hub by leaving a comment here.

Le cabinet Solucom, cabinet de conseil en management du système d’information, publie un premier livre blanc sur les retours d’expérience cumulés durant des années dans le domaine de la gestion de la donnée de référence ainsi que son importance stratégique dans le système d’information et un deuxième sur les acteurs du marché MDM.

Pour télécharger ces deux documents au format PDF, suivez les liens suivants :
-

http://www.solucom.fr/IMG/pdf/offresdumarcheMDM.pdf

-http://www.solucom.fr/IMG/pdf/Livre_blanc_MDM_Solucom-2.pdf

“All NDAs are lifted” were the magic words uttered by Steve Miranda from Oracle at the Fusion Inner Circle Event at Oracle OpenWorld on October 15^th.

Just to make sure, I asked Steve explicitly during the Q&A section of the program if it was okay under the non-disclosure agreement we had all signed to write about Fusion on my blog, and he said “Yes.”

Hub Designs was invited back in February to help Oracle’s Fusion MDM team with some design review, validation, and testing activities. In return for our assistance, we’ve gotten to see Fusion MDM inside and out, and we can proudly say that we are one of the very few trusted partners who helped Oracle to design and develop the application.

We participated in a lot of conference calls with Haidong Song, Oracle’s Product Strategy Director for Customer MDM, and other members of his team. And we attended a week-long “hands-on validation” event at Oracle headquarters in August, looking specifically at the customer data management aspects of the Fusion MDM hub.

My first impressions of Fusion MDM during that hands-on session were very favorable. I remember thinking to myself, “Oracle could almost start selling this into the MDM hub market right now!”

Of course, Fusion isn’t scheduled to ship until sometime in 2010, and there’s still plenty of work to be done between now and then. But the core functionality needed for master data management was there, and the Oracle Fusion MDM team had a room full of customers and partners banging on it for a week without any significant crashes or issues.

There was plenty to like in Fusion that didn’t relate specifically to master data management – the new and improved user interface, the embedded analytics, the modern, standards-based architecture, the usability research that Oracle has done, the improved business processes, the built-in collaboration capabilities …

But the fundamentals of MDM were strong as well. Haidong and his team demonstrated how to import and consolidate customer data from outside sources, and we did our first hands-on lab session bringing in a small customer data load from a desktop file, such as a list of trade show leads.

We also tested a larger volume of customer data being brought into Fusion MDM through the Bulk Import process.

We did another exercise simulating how a typical customer data steward would identify potential duplicate customers, and then resolve those duplicates by merging the duplicate parties.

We also got a good look at the Informatica components that Oracle is bundling into Fusion on an OEM basis: the former Identity Systems matching engine and the former Address Doctor address cleansing tool. Previous Oracle MDM products like Customer Data Hub have had loose integration with Trillium and Firstlogic for address cleansing, but it’s refreshing to see Oracle investing in deep integration with industry leading solutions.

I think there are going to be a lot of Oracle customers who will move to Fusion MDM as the first wave of their overall migration to Fusion, who will see Fusion MDM as a good way to get some early experience with the Fusion applications family, before committing their mission critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to the Fusion platform.

And in 2010 and beyond, I think will be a lot of potential customers who evaluate Fusion MDM positively on its own merits against competitive MDM hubs. Oracle brings a robust data model, open architecture, and a next-generation approach to master data management, with state-of-the-art matching, data quality, middleware, and business process management.

Please let me know by commenting here what your thoughts and expectations are for Oracle’s Fusion MDM hub.

• TRASFERIMENTO TECNOLOGICO VIVI INNOVAZIONE INTERAZIONE NATURALE VEGA 25 novembre 2009

Mercoledì 25 Novembre 2009, ore 15.30
Vega Parco Scientifico di Venezia – Edificio Porta dell’Innovazione

VENETO D.I. – INTERAZIONE NATURALE CON IL VENETO DIGITALE
MDM METADISTRETTO DIGITALMEDIALE DEL VENETO
TI INVITANO AL WORKSHOP TECNICO DI TRASFERIMENTO TECNOLOGICO SULL’INTERAZIONE NATURALE

Le 17 aziende che partecipano al progetto “Veneto D.I.” condividono le tecnologie, gli strumenti e i risultati del progetto che ha permesso la realizzazione dell’info point turistico ad Interazione Naturale VIKY (Veneto Interactive Key for You) installato presso l’aeroporto di Venezia Marco Polo.

PROGRAMMA
ORE 15.30
Registrazione partecipanti

ORE 16.00
Introduzione – Sala Plenaria
Massimo Colomban, Rappresentante Metadistretto Digitalmediale MDM
Michele Vianello, Direttore Generale VEGA, Parco Scientifico Tecnologico di Venezia

Leo Pillon, iO Srl Capofila del progetto
Presentazione del progetto – Realizzazione – Cos’è l’Interazione Naturale
Possibili applicazioni delle tecnologie – Risultati

ORE 17.00
Tavoli Tecnici di Approfondimento Sale 1, 3 e 4

ORE 18.00
Aperitivo di chiusura

As winter approaches I find that the focus of our practice is taking form rapidly.  Customers have not mastered and are having difficulties adopting and  applying basic data management principles and practices.  Specifically the ability to establish consistency in meta data  and in data representation.  The root causes are common and complex.  Future entries will discuss our findings.

The common solution apparently is to construct the “ubiquitous” enterprise data warehouse.  Maybe invest in a master data management project to smooth the transition and invest in state of the art software to insure success.  Something is missing and the end results are clear,  there  is no such construct as an enterprise data warehouse.   Nor are the enabling practices in place from detailed project planning through data governance to even establish any semblance of order acceptable to a frequently frustrated and impatient business community.

Without belaboring my somewhat brief and possibly flawed view of the problems we are proposing to solve, the purpose of this blog is to gain insight into practices, cultures, tools, patterns and other topics pertinent to effective management of data across the enterprise.  So our mighty team of  data travelers  will conjure up frequent posts on our journey.   I look forward to your comments.

I had a great time at the Oracle OpenWorld conference this year.

Oracle did a great job organizing the MDM track. There were a lot of great presentations, and a good balance of speakers between Oracle people, outside consultants and experts, and end users with success stories to share.

David Butler, Senior Director of MDM Marketing at Oracle, was kind enough to convert my presentation titled “Best Practices in Master Data Management and Data Governance” to PDF format and to post it on the Oracle.com MDM web page.

You can find it in the ‘Partners’ portlet on the right hand side of the page, or just click here.

The excellent IAIDQ World Quality Day webinar looked at what the Data Quality landscape might be like in 5 years time, in 2014.  This got me thinking.  Dylan Jones excellent article on The perils of procrastination made me think some more…

Plug and Play Data

I believe that we data quality professionals need a paradigm shift in the way we think about data.  We need to make “Get data right first time” and  ”Data Quality By Design” such no brainers that procrastination is not an option.   We need to promote a vision of the future in which all data is reusable and interchangeable – a world of “Plug and Play Data”.

Everybody, even senior business management, understand the concepts of “plug and play” and reusable play blocks.  For “plug and play” to succeed, interconnecting parts must be complete, fully moulded, and conform to clearly defined standards.  Hence “plug and play data” must be complete, fully populated, and conform to clearly defined standards (business rules).

How can organisations “get it right first time” and create “plug and play data”?
It is now relatively simple to invoke cloud based verification from any part of a system through which data enters.

For example, when opening a new “Student” bank account, cloud based verification might prompt the bank assistant with a message like “Mr. Jones’ date of birth suggests he is 48 years old.  Is his date of birth correct?  Is a “Student Account” appropriate for Mr. Jones”?

In conclusion:

We Data Quality Professionals need to educate both Business and IT on the need for, and the benefits of “plug and play data”.   We need to explain to senior management that data is no longer needed or used by only one application.  We need to explain that even tactical solutions within Lines of Business need to consider Enterprise demands for data such as:

1. Data feed into regulatory systems (e.g Anti Money Laundering, BASEL II, Solvency II)
2. Access from or data feed into CRM system
3. Access from or data feed into Business Intelligence system
4. Ad hoc provision of data to satisfy regulatory requests
5. Increasingly – feeds to and from other organisations in the supply chain
6. Ultimate replacement of application with newer generation system

We must educate the business on the increasingly dynamic information requirements of the Enterprise – which can only be satisfied by getting data “right first time” and by creating “plug and play data” that can be easily reused and interconnected.

What do you think?

Talend announces the first open source MDM solution

Talend, a provider in open source data integration software, recently announced it has acquired all rights to the master data management (MDM) technology of Amalto Technologies. As a result of this acquisition, Talend will be the first company to offer an open source MDM solution, providing organizations with the exact features and benefits found in proprietary MDM solutions, at a fraction of the cost.

Organizations of all sizes need to ensure that they have “a single version of the truth” in order to have a trusted and unified view of the data on their customers, partners and employees. Unfortunately, MDM continues to be beyond the reach of most organizations. The entry point for deployment of proprietary MDM products can range from the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Talend is democratizing MDM for the masses in the exact way it has done with open and cost-optimized data quality and data integration technology. It will shortly offer a free version of its open source MDM solution under the GNU General Public License as well as a commercial subscription version with value-added features and services for enterprise deployment. The new Master Data Management solutions will be available in early 2010.

“Many of the Global 5000 size organizations we work with will be delighted to see a major open source player enter the fast growth MDM market, especially at a time when organizations are doing all they can to optimize the ROI of their projects,” said Aaron Zornes, Chief Research Officer at The MDM Institute. “Talend has a proven track record in software technology domains closely related to MDM and will also bring their open source business acumen and track record to bear in the MDM market.”

It started in the spring of 2003 and has been going on since then. I am referring to the consolidation among the enterprise application vendors.

I remember the good old days of ERP when there were a handful of vendors- BaaN, QAD, SAP, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft.  BaaN was the market leader in the beginning and boasted of clients like Boeing. The technology was client-server, clients belonged mostly to manufacturing, consumer goods sector and were FORTUNE 500 firms.

It’s interesting to see that almost all technology trends, at least in the enterprise app domain, start from the big FORTUNE 500 firms and then everyone else jumps on to the bandwagon.

Anyways, almost all the big 8 (BIG 5 later) audit firms opened an ERP consulting arm and body shopping for developers was rampant. New types of applications were launched by many small vendors- SCM like i2, manugistics; CRM like Siebel; Datawarehousing/BI/BW etc…..

So, all was hunky dory till the market became saturated towards end of the 90’s. Almost all FORTUNE 500 firms had implemented ERP and the days of astronomical billing rates per hour were over. BaaN disappeared without a trace and so did one of the BIG consulting firms. Outsourcing, off-shoring was in demand. SOX came in and audit firms had to divest their consulting arms. The clients were now SMEs and wanted value for money solutions.The left over ERP vendors responded by going on a mad consolidation spree.  Kind of like Megatron chasing the “AllSpark” cube . It started when Oracle made a hostile bid for Peoplesoft,  JD Edwards merged with Peoplesoft and so on…..More than 50 acquisitions happened in a span of half a decade. SAP responded with counter bids in a few cases. And all this did not happen due to an economic recession. Enterprise applications market has been in a recession of its own since 2000.

When the dust settled, only four big vendors were left in the enterprise app space: IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft. And now they sell everything from database to middleware to GUI and even hardware.New licence sales is down and they are surviving on maintenance revenues (part of the reason why JDEdwards, Peoplesoft are still surviving as products). These BIG 4 have a plethora of products some of them meant to do the same thing. Whoa!! their sales force must be a confused lot…One of them sells 3 MDM solutions all meant for PIM , another is targeting SMEs with 3 acquired and one in-house product…. and still clients aren’t happy. Why ?

Is creativity and customer-centricity dead? These BIG 4 do not listen to customers? They are just happy pushing their fancy possessions down the throat of hapless customers? Or is it the other way round: customers have become so cost conscious that they have stopped supporting new and better ideas/products.

I can see a ray of hope. Customers are still willing to reject the solutions put forward by the BIG 4 vendors and buy enterprise software from small niche players. A look at any of the Magic quadrants reveals an interesting story. Even though the big fish gobbled up the smaller ones , new fish are still being born and they are surviving. Hope is alive.

LONG LIVE CHOICE…..