by Angela Guess
A new article takes a look at the often over-simplified MDM issue of aligning business and IT: “Business and IT alignment is a topic repeated ad nauseam. There seems to be a belief that the Holy Grail of IT is achieved once that alignment is in place. This belief applies strongly to Master Data Management (MDM) as well. Our experience, however, is that sticking to the truism of the need for ‘business & IT alignment’ is an oversimplification at best and utterly misleading at worst. The chasm to bridge is often really not between ‘business’ and ‘IT’. It is also very much within business and within IT.”
The article goes on to outline two common issues: “(1) Different business units / processes / functions refuse to see Master Data from the perspective of others: a salesman and a delivery person have different views on customer data; purchasing organization and manufacturing look at material data from very different perspectives; (2) Professionals from different IT areas have varying viewpoints on Master Data Management: people with data warehousing and Extract/Transform/Load background do not talk the same language as Data Quality and MDM tool professionals.” The article notes, “The fundamental challenge in Master Data Management and Data Governance lies in the above situations, in real boundary-spanning cooperation between different parts of the organization.”
The article continues, “So, what to do? The central tenet of Data Governance and Master Data Management, managing data as a critical asset across the entire organization, often doesn’t happen for the above discussed reasons. Elegant jumps over the gaps are rarely possible. Turf wars abound, within business and within IT. The answer is that a serious practitioner should learn from how boundary-spanning leadership is done and reflect them in his or her approach to overcoming Data Governance and MDM challenges. Quoting the Drucker Exchange: ‘Our world is more interconnected than ever before, but what sorts of boundaries still keeps an organization divided within, thereby undercutting its chances for success?’”
photo credit: no lurvin here.
