Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

The Change Management Challenge

Because change can often be very disruptive and is usually expected to be completed under a specific plan with a fixed time frame, the quality and execution of a data migration effort can suffer due to the time constraints. Customer data that has been poorly translated and mapped into new models can cause significant issues down the road with operational processes and customer transactions. In many cases, this could have been avoided with early engagement of an existing data governance or data steward team in the change management plans and expectations.

During organizational and operational change, subject matter experts on the business side who have been intimate with the business processes and context of the data, are often transitioned quickly into new organizational structures and environments, or possibly even let go, while IT has the responsibility to transition the systems and data without much context to the data and prior usage. This often results in poorly migrated and mapped data that can degrade overall data quality and create many operational issues until this can be corrected at a later time.

Data Governance Can Greatly Assist a Transitioning State

In Chapter 4, we mentioned that when positioned correctly, a data governance function can nicely fill a data management authority void and serve a very valuable role with an existing IT decision-making process and design methodology (see Figure 4.2). This also holds true with other forms ...