Master Data Management

One of the most exciting pieces of software to come down the pike in many years is one picked up in a recent acquisition by Hyperion Solutions. It's one of the reasons I have to be fairly jazzed about the kinds of systems I'll be able to build in the coming months. Formerly called Razza, it's Master Data Manager.

If you had asked me a month ago what was the best way to make money in the Enterprise Computing business, I would have told you Master Data Management. I wouldn't have used that precise term, I would have probably said something like this:

One of the biggest problems for me, in building systems with the tools I have is always the political problem of getting all the people talking the same language. A significant reason why DW initiatives fail is because the metadata is all over the place and everybody spends too much time chasing the data down rather than analyzing it. All I need are my tools (speaking of Essbase outlines) and then I get functional people and technical people speaking the same language, because everybody can see how the numbers and entities roll up. The reason Informatica is making all kinds of money in this space is because they promise to solve this problem.

Well here's what IDC says.

Master data management is a challenging, long-standing problem. But recent attention to business performance management and compliance represent a new opportunity to deal with the issue in a way that can improve both information accuracy and organizational agility.

With Hyperion's MDM, I believe the problem has been solved. As soon as I get a copy I'll get deep into the details, but basically this is a collaborative tool that will allow enterprises to manage all of their dimensions, whether they change slowly or quickly, back through history.

Imagining the worst spaghetti possible, a partial migration between ERP systems without the benefit of ETL, a MDM Server would get everyone on the same page. How many times have I had people squawk about the complexity of Peoplesoft Trees and complain that their reporting systems use one drill down and their interal reporting systems use another and that the Business Objects Universe was painstakingly coded with another? And how many times have I had to be the one to reverse engineer all that rot and put into my systems? Too many to count.

I'm going to have a field day with this tool. Believe that.

I've moved this post over from my current events blog. Even today however I piped up in a meeting pubbing up this tool. I still haven't managed to get my paws on it for various political and licensing issues, but this seems to have applications everywhere. I could do a national practice just with this tool alone. In fact, I expect to.

Comments

[Stephen Pace]

Michael,

I totally agree this is an exciting area. From what we've seen, though, the Hyperion MDM solution appears mostly oriented to maintaining financial hierarchies in Essbase. While you may be able to stretch it other areas, not having a web-front end for data stewards to maintain the members is a serious flaw. Hyperion MDM has a read-only web portal currently (although they are supposed to be addressing this in the future), so if you want to edit the data, you'll need to install the thick client application throughout your organization to take full advantage. This is a non-starter for most Global 2000 organizations.

For a list of other master data tools you may wish to examine, see:

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Master_Data_Management/

[Juno888]

This is a non-starter for most Global 2000 organizations.