Master Data Blues

Master Data Management is currently one of the hot topics doing the rounds of Enterprise IT. For those unaware of the concept MDM is basically the storing, either physically or virtually, of all corporate reference data in a single MDM repository. Consultancies love to sell MDM solutions for two reasons:

1) They are quite easy to justify
2) MDM technology, whilst expensive, is available

So in theory we should all be swimming in MDM's by now. I don't know about you but I'm not. In fact a friend of mine became the first and only person I know to land a successful MDM Project.

So if we agree that it's the correct thing to do, and that the technology is available then why don't we see MDM's all around.

Simple really - the business side of MDM is very, very hard so before you begin you'd best make sure that the business understand what they are biting off.

Of course, if we'd kept a tight rein on our corporate IT systems in the first place then we wouldn't need MDM would we!

Assisting the Police with their inquiries

Back in 1998 I was doing some Pre-Sales Consulting for an Account Manager trying to sell a Data Warehouse solution to a local state police force. I badgered the salesman to let me use the above title as a tagline on the demo but unsurprisingly he didn't see the funny side.

During the demo the thorny question of Metadata came up. More precisely - Consolidated Metedata. As I'd just come off a project where I'd defined the Metadata Architecture and Solution I was well qualified to answer the query.

At the time we had three sources of metadata for our solution. These were:

- The Database Data Dictionary
- The CASE/Data Modeling tool in use
- The ROLAP Semantic Layer

Note that this we didn't use an ETL product that would have been a fourth source of Metadata.

Now the interesting thing here is that all the software was written by the same company in the same software labs so one would hope that some level of shared metadata would be possible. Alas no. Not only did the metadata in each repository overlap but there was no easy way of combining it into a single source of consolidated metadata repository.

I answered the question honestly that nobody had a good story here, not us nor our competition. I think the client appreciated my honesty here. The account manager obviously not wanting to leave a bad impression did what all account managers are prone to do and started promising vaporware with some cock and bull story about the software labs in California working on that problem.

The interesting thing is that here we are over a decade later and I've still to see a good answer to this problem.