Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

Executive Involvement

It is in the initial planning state of the Customer MDM and data governance where executive involvement is most critical in order to establish the basic assumptions about ownership roles. As previously mentioned, often there is an existing executive role and organization that is already a strong advocate and well suited to drive the Customer MDM initiative and its ongoing practice. But assuming or suggesting this person will be the owner of customer data may be controversial and not at all practical. Why start a political battle that's not necessary? The point here is that in a cross-functional Customer MDM initiative, data ownership is not typically an autonomous role. If within a company there is a business climate and model that lends well to having the Customer MDM initiative and data owned by one organization, that's fine, too, but often this will not be the case because of the segmented nature of the business practices.

MDM with Segmented Business Practices

Although MDM is about the discipline and control of master data and its associated processes, this does not imply that create, update, and delete responsibilities for much of the data itself should be the responsibility of one central group. This would not be practical because in a typical business model the process flow and life cycle of customer data will involve various segments of the business. As noted previously, customer data typically consists of data attributes that originate from the various ...