by Angela Guess
Brian McKenna recently reported that “Last year, oil and gas giant Shell executed an enterprise master data management (MDM) proof-of-concept project that ripped up the rule book. It is a nostrum of corporate IT that IT should never lead the business. And so the drive for MDM should come from the business, not IT, and not data architecture. Yet Shell’s group lead data architect Andrew Schulze and Duncan Slater, an Accenture consultant working on the project, took the much derided ‘build it and they will come’ path.”
McKenna continues, “Shell, which employs 93,000 people, uses the Data Management Association’s twofold definition of MDM: ‘processes that ensure that master reference data is kept up to date and coordinated across an enterprise. The organization, management and distribution of corporately adjudicated data with widespread use in the organization.’ The PoC was intended to create the foundation of MDM both for business intelligence and to authorize master data back into source systems.”
He goes on, “The project, which ran from November 2009 till March 2010, evaluated SAP MDM and Microsoft Master Data Services (MDS) against 16 MDM scenarios, from ‘match and merge’ through ‘creating ERP business content’ to security audit capabilities, but Schulze stressed that the proof-of-concept project was not a tool test. ‘It was more ‘this is the business requirement from MDM; how can these tools help do that?’’ he said. Slater led a team for the project that was drawn from SAP, Microsoft, Accenture and Wipro. It was accountable to a steering committee consisting of architects and business representatives from the major business groups at Shell, and it met every Friday.”
photo credit: Shell
