Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

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 ...