by Angela Guess
In a recent interview, Jignesh Shah of Software AG shared his insights on recent trends that are shining a spotlight on master data management. Shah stated, “First, I think, has been the focus on improving cross-functional processes – processes that cut across different departmental boundaries. As enterprises have engaged in a variety of different initiatives in things like process reengineering or BPM, they realize a lot of the improvement is not possible without fixing the underlying master data that often connects these functional silos or system silos.”
Shah added, “If you look at some of the research, Gartner’s clients reported this year that process improvement has become the number one driver for investment in MDM. That is a sign that a lot of the operational concerns and benefits are driving master data management. The other thing that seems to be happening is a focus on building shared or repeatable business capabilities. Here I’m specifically referring to things like SOA. The idea behind SOA is to build capabilities once that are then reused by different business processes, departments, functions, lines of business and so on.”
He continued, “When you attempt to do something by SOA, once again you realize that building repeatable business capabilities is not possible when the underlying data and the underlying systems that support those business capabilities have inconsistent, error-prone, duplicate data. Very often we find that customers who want to scale up on SOA realize that they have to fix data quality problems before they can create SOA services and repeatable business capabilities. These are the two big trends.”
