Gartner

A Master Data Mind Map

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl8 Comments

A challenge within many disciplines is easily to explain what the discipline is about and that certainly is true for Master Data Management (MDM) too as we often have the question: What is master data?

A good short explanation is:

“The description of the who, what and where in transaction data”.

It could also, with help from Wikipedia, be:

“Information that is key to the operation of a business”.

From Gartner (the analyst firm) we have:

“The consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise”.

The latter one I would not try on friends and relatives though.

Examples are often a good way to go. Visualization is great too. So, therefore I have played with a mind map of what master data entities may be:

Master Data

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Should there be an App for MDM?

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

MDM may be many different things. For me it’s about Master Data Management and for others it’s about Mobile Device Management.

A recent twitter chat session organized by Gartner (the analyst firm) had the tag #GartnerMDM. It was about Master Data Management but of course there also were questions about Mobile Device Management. Andrew White of Gartner replied:

GartnerMDM

And sure. One of the foremost technology trends being mobile doesn’t have the same attention as other hyped trends like big, social and cloudy within this MDM, but mobile may actually also play a role within master data management.

In my current work with product strategy and product management for a startup within data quality and master data management called iDQ we have been playing with some business cases around an App for this MDM. It has for example been aiming at getting it first time right when NGOs are finding new members on the street and when energy retailers are onboarding new customers on the street.

Have you stumbled upon some business cases for an App for this MDM?

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MDM for Product Data Quadrant: No challengers. A half visionary.

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions is out. You may have a free look at it for example going through Tibco’s press release on the matter here or directly thanks to IBM here.

MDM Brands
This is not the quadrant. Just some names.

My thoughts are kind of the same as told in the post MDM for Customer Data Quadrant: No challengers. No visionaries. Let’s just have a (Multi-Domain) MDM quadrant.

The quadrant for customer MDM solutions had no challengers and no visionaries. The quadrant for product MDM solutions has a half visionary, as Informatica is positioned as a niche player with its recent Heiler acquisition and just on the right side of the border between niche players and visionaries with what must be the Siperian acquisition from a couple of years ago. This solution has multi-domain capabilities as an important strength.

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MDM for Customer Data Quadrant: No challengers. No visionaries.

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl4 Comments

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data Solutions is out. You may have a free look at it for example going through Talend’s press release on the matter here.

MDM Brands
PS: This isn’t the quadrant. Just a few vendor names.

It’s not a crowded picture. There are few solutions in there and several come from the same brand. And there are no challengers and no visionaries.

Gartner expect that challengers may arrive later for example as those who are building up multi-domain MDM solutions right now. Should be interesting to see what comes first: Challengers in the customer MDM quadrant or a multi-domain MDM quadrant. Other analysts have a single view of MDM vendors.

From where will we see the visionaries then? Gartner says current niche players may spread into the visionary field. If we will see new vendors emerging into the visionary field it may in my eyes be based on the Growing Variety in Big Master Data which includes widening the term customer data into taking care of all kinds of party master data.

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What’s New in The Data Quality Magic Quadrant?

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools 2013 is out. If you don’t want to pay Gartner’s fee for having a look, you can sign up for a free copy on one of the vendor’s websites for example here at Trillium Software Insights.

So, what’s new this year?

It is pretty much the same picture as last year with X88 as the only new intruder. Else the news is that some vendors “now appear under slightly different names”. And now Ted Friedman is the only author.

The most exciting part, in my eyes, is the words about how the market will develop. Some seen and foreseen trends are:

  • Information governance programs drive the need for data quality tools.
  • Cloud based deployments are gaining traction.
  • Growth expected for embracing less-structured data, not at least social data, by using big data techniques and sources.

That’s good news.

Data Quality Tools

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Big Data Veracity

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

Veracity is often mentioned as the 4th V of big data besides Volume, Velocity and Variety.

While veracity of course is paramount for a data quality geek like me veracity is kind of a different thing compared to volume, velocity and variety as these three terms are something that defines big data and veracity is more a desirable capacity of big data. This argument is often prompted by Doug Laney of Gartner (the analyst firm) who is behind the Volume, Velocity and Variety concept that also was coined as Extreme Data at some point.

Doug Laney on Veracity
Comment in discussion on the Big Data Quality LinkedIn group

As mentioned in the post Five Flavors of Big Data the challenges with data quality – or veracity – is very different with the various types of big data. If I should order the mentioned types of big data I would say that veracity has more challenges in this order going from some challenges to huge challenges:

  • Big reference data
  • Big transaction data
  • Web logs
  • Sensor data
  • Social data

It’s interesting that you may say that variety has the same increasing order, but volume and velocity doesn’t necessarily follow that order apart from that big reference data is less challenging in all respects and therefore maybe isn’t big data at all. However I like it to be. That is because big reference data in my eyes will play a big role in order to solve the veracity challenge for the other types of big data.

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On Washing Rental Cars and Shared Data

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

Recently a tweet from Doug Laney of Gartner has been retweeted a lot:

Rented Car

As most analogies it may fit or maybe not fit seen in different perspectives. Actually rental cars are probably some of the most washed cars as the rental company wash and clean the car between every rental.

In the same way as rental cars usually are quite clean I have also found that sharing data is a powerful way to have clean data as told on the page about Data Quality 3.0. This is also the grounding concept behind the instant Data Quality solution I’m working with, where we have just released our iDQ™ MDM Edition.

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Multi-Entity MDM vs Multidomain MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl11 Comments

puzzleOn the upcoming MDM Summit Europe 2013 in London this April you will be able to learn about Multi-Entity MDM as well as Multi-Domain MDM.

So, what is the difference between Multi-Entity MDM and Multi-Domain MDM?

To my knowledge it is two terms having the same meaning. It is doing the two main preceding disciplines for MDM being Customer Data Integration (CDI) and Product Information Management (PIM) at the same time presumably using the same software brand.

Multi-Entity MDM was probably the first term used and still used by The MDM Institute while Multidomain MDM is used by Gartner (the analyst firm) and most tool vendors today. For example Stibo Systems is focusing on mutidomain recently in this press release about latest achievements.

Talking about Gartner and the vendor crowd Gartner analyst Andrew White wrote a blog post the other day: Round-Up of Master Data Management (MDM) 2012, and looking forward to 2013.

Herein White bashes the vendors by saying:

“Vendor hype related to multidomain …. continued to be far in excess of reality”.

What do you think? Is Andrew White right about that? And what about Multi-Entity MDM, is that any better?

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Defining Social MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl10 Comments

Social MDM2Social Master Data Management (Social MDM) has been a recurring subject on this blog for a couple of years. But what is Social MDM? What do others say it is?

Here is what Techopedia, Gartner and The MDM Institute thinks:

Techopedia has this definition of Social MDM:

Definition – What does Social Master Data Management (Social MDM) mean?

Social master data management (Social MDM) refers to the processes, policies and concepts used to gather and compile social media data sources – like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – into one master file.

Gartner (the analyst firm) hasn’t to my knowledge used the term Social MDM. In 2011 they though said that this will be one of three main trends in MDM:

Increasing Links Between MDM and Social Networks

By 2015, 15 percent of organizations will have added social media data about their customers to the customer master data attributes they manage in their MDM systems….

In 2012, as reported in the post The Big MDM Trend, Gartner, The Hype Cycle firm, changed the point to be about MDM and Big Data.

The MDM Institute has a Field Report from April 2012 where Aaron Zornes (who is the MDM institute) writes:

Social MDM (Cloud-enablement, Architecture & Integration)

During 2012, cloud-enabled MDM will attract small- and mid-sized businesses as a means to engage in MDM without committing to long-term project and major expense….

By 2014-15, cloud-innate services for data quality and Data Governance will be more prevalent than full Social MDM…

So the MDM institute thinks Social MDM is MDM in the cloud.

What do you think?

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The Big MDM Trend

Henrik Gabs LiliendahlLeave a comment

Back in 2011 Gartner (the analyst firm) released a document where Gartner Highlights Three Trends That Will shape the Master Data Management Market.

The three things were:

  • Multi-Domain MDM
  • MDM in the Cloud
  • MDM and Social Networks

MDM and Social Networks (also called Social MDM) was described as shown below:

Gartner 3 MDM things 2011

In a 2012 article on Computerweekly called Three trends that will shape the master data management market also by John Radcliffe of Gartner the three trends are repeated however with social MDM now described in the context of MDM and big data:

Gartner 3 MDM things 2012

The slightly different use of terms to describe the trends and what it entails used by Gartner follows the big trend of using the term “big data” by everyone else in the industry as discussed in the post Data Quality vs Big Data, where you see that the use of the term “big data” exploded just after the original Gartner piece on the three trends.

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