Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

Planning and Design

One of the first and most serious mistakes commonly made with implementing a data governance plan is that it is not considered and planned for early enough. The need for data governance usually emerges only after there has been widespread recognition and executive consensus that data quality and integrity problems are at a sufficient level of impact to warrant a governance focus. A lack of standardization and control of the data will eventually raise its ugly head during data integration or migration projects, or if compliance, privacy, or data security issues are creating risk factors, or if poor data is sufficiently hindering the ability to produce good business intelligence.

Often, large IT projects involving data migration and integration are planned, budgeted for, and launched without a data governance plan, only to quickly realize that there are many business issues with the data definition, usage, standards, mapping, and the acceptable level of quality that need to be resolved before the data migration requirements and integration processes can be completed. Had these issues been better anticipated and a governance forum created early on in the plan to address these issues, the project would have proceeded far more smoothly.

Early consideration and planning for data governance will pay its dividends later. Let's look at how to get a CDG planning and design process started.

Establishing the Charter

There can be any number of reasons why companies begin ...