The term self-service is used increasingly within data management. Self-service may be about people within your organization using self-service capabilities as in self-service business intelligence. But probably more disruptive it may be about customer self-service and supplier self-service meaning that people outside your organization are increasingly more dependent on the level of data quality you can offer within your services.
Customer self-service will not succeed without you offering decent data quality related to product information as exemplified in the post Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus. There will be more happy customer self-service events with more complete product information. Knowing your customer better helps with helping your customer doing self-serving. And in that sense it may be Time To Turn Your Customer Master Data Management Social?
Supplier self-service will not fly if you do not know your suppliers and their differences, which is quite similar to the concept of knowing your customer as explained in the post Single Business Partner View. When it comes to approaches to data management within supplier engagement there are several options as those examined in the post Sharing Product Master Data.
Do you think data governance is hard enough when dealing with the dear people within your own organization? I have news for you. It’s going to be even tougher when dealing with all the lovely people outside your organization who you will ask to be part of your data collection and consumption workspace.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
My impression is that Data Governance has a scary image and most of ‘normal’ people are afraid even to register in a system that supports data quality.
May be they afraid to do something wrong? Or expect it will be too much work that no one will appreciate?
There are two big worlds:
– fun and easy solutions like Facebook and twitter, where people can express their ideas and communicate;
– corporate systems and solutions where people work because there is no choice, if they can avoid it they will avoid.
The third type that is a combination of voluntary input and useful results is not so big, the number one example is Wikipedia. You are 100% right that it is hard to involve people into data management initiatives when it is not obligatory. May be you have some ideas about possible incentives specific for data quality initiatives and expert solutions?
Well, Henrik, you are still not reqistered in Actualog Social PIM! And we have a category for MDM, PIM and would be happy to see you as an expert 🙂 http://en-us.actualog.com/category/master-data-management-system
I have registered right away Kate 🙂
Congatulations! Now are an expert in the Master Data Systems category 🙂 It means that all you changes will apply without approval and you can approve other user changes in the category.