1. Master Data Management
Still Failing
After All These Years

2. Paul Balas
pbalas@303Computing.com
25 Years Experience Leading Digital
Transformations
Multiple MDM Implementations, Data
Governance, and Data Warehouse Initiatives
❖ Digital Transformation Consultant
❖ IT Executive
❖ Enterprise Architect
❖ Developer

3. Confidential – Tamr, Inc.
MDM Past, Present, and Future
Past - Legacy MDM Approaches
Present - What Vendors have done to address past failures
Future - What will differentiate the winners?

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What is MDM?
Master data management ("MDM")
is a technology-enabled discipline in
which business and Information
Technology ("IT") work together to
ensure the uniformity, accuracy,
stewardship, semantic consistency
and accountability of the
enterprise's official shared master
data assets.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_data_management

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If you don’t have trust
In your data
You can’t use it to drive
Company Performance

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What Should You Achieve With Best-in-Class MDM?
Stakeholders have TRUST in their data
Stewards benefit from their INVESTMENT in time
Better ALIGNMENT across teams
Spend MORE time on Analysis and LESS on Data Preparation
Faster TIME-TO-VALUE

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The Past

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PIM and Customer MDM
Customer 360 and Product Information Management (PIM)
❖ Match/Merge
❖ Right of Survivorship
❖ Procedural Rules
❖ Hard-coded
❖ Data Stewardship a solo activity and not very efficient
❖ Little else
❖ Larger companies had to buy both solutions

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The Present
What are vendors promoting to solve your MDM challenges today?

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MDM is Expensive!
Gartner says on average the people costs of MDM
projects are four times that of the software licenses
Reducing the time to implement is a critical driving
factor to reduce implementation cost and risk

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“Enterprise MDM is No Silver Bullet”
“Enterprise MDM software is no silver bullet,” says Sally
Parker, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner. “Technology alone is
insufficient to solve the bigger problem of data and analytics
governance, which involves people, process and technology
across the enterprise.” - Gartner

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Why Are Analysts Scared of MDM Projects?
MDM initiatives often fail when organizations don’t ensure organizational readiness before
starting. Many also confuse what is and isn’t master data. They treat all data as equal and fail
to identify and prioritize their master data. - Susan Moore
“Be realistic about your readiness to adopt an enterprise MDM solution,” Parker says. “Ask
first if you have the type of culture, data and analytics maturity, and the right level of
executive support required for cross-organizational collaboration.” - Sally Parker

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It’s People ...
Data Hoarding and protectionism are real
Departmental silos are real
MDM requires people to collaborate irrespective of organizational units
Cross-functional teams are a necessity in most hi-value MDM projects

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Executive Support
The reason why the Analysts and Consultants start with “You need top-down support”
is for those reasons
BUT ...
The real reason is that traditional MDM Vendors don’t address the real issue:
❖ It’s time-consuming to deliver a solution, and
❖ It’s painful to get good results on legacy technologies...
❖ Which creates a high burden on the organization, and Data Stewards

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Data Steward Objections
I’ve heard every one of these objections …
❖ I already have a day job
❖ We need a dedicated team to fix this data
❖ Can’t we hire someone to do this? I’ll oversee them
❖ How can I spend 20 hours a week fixing data and do my job?
❖ I have been doing this with spreadsheets for 10 years and it’s inexpensive
❖ Did you get Bob’s buy-in in Customer Service? It won’t work without him

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Every MDM Vendor Says - “Empower The
Steward”
Ask yourself -
How long does it take to train a steward?
How much of their day is fixing rules or correcting the results?
How does you platform enable subject matter experts to collaborate without
getting in a room or on the phone?

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Every CXO Says “No More Tribal Knowledge”
They know they are beholden to the tribal knowledge on how the data works
They know that without Bob or Jan in Department X their reporting would suffer
It’s intellectual property that belongs to the company…
MDM Vendors will say they solve for this
But how they solve for it will make or break your success…
What are some other problems?

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Business vs. IT - The Battle of The Titans
What is a business rule?
It’s any rule built in your MDM system used to standardize or organize master data
MDM fails when your platform requires an act of IT to make a change to the rules or a long
training to let business users implement some of the simpler rules
❖ It’s slow
❖ It’s frustrating
❖ Your building technical debt and complexity that will fail in time
❖ It’s costing your business money in opportunity and operating costs
❖ Most Data Stewards hate manual data entry

19. Confidential – Tamr, Inc.
Agile to The Rescue!
Yes, agile is the way to structure your project (most projects)
It’s a way to align business value with achievable outcomes for specific stakeholders
that have explained how they will use your software to achieve that value
Agile will increase your odds of getting stakeholder buy-in more quickly
BUT...
It can’t cure for an archaic MDM platform that does things the old way

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Aging MDM Platforms kill the agility to adapt to change

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Especially When IT Works Like This...
Fill out this form…
Learn The IT Process…
I need a month to do this…

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MDM Agility Killers
Procedural rules-based code (if then else…)
Software requires a lot of training
Changing rules is expensive and requires significant testing
Software doesn’t make the Data Stewards life easier
No mechanism for e-collaboration
Adding a new data source is an act of G-d

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On-Prem Implementations are DOA
Cloud Solutions are a given

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Best of Breed vs. Integrated Offering
MDM solutions—with embedded,
proprietary integration tools—compete
with companies that have data
integration as a competency
Some vendors offer data quality and
integrated dashboards
Best-of-Breed vendors tend to be more
agile and do ‘one-thing-extremely-
well’.

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Multi-Entity Mastering is Now Table-Stakes
Your business is more than Customers or Products
Your MDM solution must be able to master all of your data
❖ Lower TCO
❖ Less complex to administer
❖ Fewer people to manage

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The Future

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What Exactly is Next-Gen MDM?
Next-generation means that the
capability offered by your vendor
provides significantly measurable
improvements over pre-existing
solutions and techniques for
solving a problem.

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Machine Learning is Next-Gen (Now)
ML is the next step-change in the MDM World
ML allows your match/merge logic to be ‘trained’ efficiently by Data Stewards
It allows them to capture their rules simply, quickly, and with minimal effort
It is more flexible and adaptable to change
This is much easier to sell internally
The legacy MDM Vendors have to rewrite their current match-merge technology to
leverage machine learning

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ML vs. Procedural MDM
Effort
Time
Train Operate
MLP

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Data Stewards - Spend More Time Analyzing/Strategizing
Before: Data Scientists spent months &
100% of energy preparing data.
Today: ML can do 80% of
data mastering lift...
…. Enabling Data Scientists to
put final touches on the last 20%.
30

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Why Hasn’t Your MDM Vendor Modernized?
Blunder #9: Succumbing to the Innovator’s Dilemma.
In his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christiansen suggests that when
technology changes, and you are a vendor that is selling the “old stuff”, it is very difficult to pivot to the new stuff, without losing
significant market share in the process.
As a business, you have to be willing to change and evolve when it is needed. It’s possible—and even likely—that a reinvention will
hurt your business in the short term, but it’s absolutely necessary to stay in business for the long run. There are plenty of examples
of this in practice. One that most people are familiar with is the emergence of ridesharing companies like Lyft and Uber, and the
negative consequences for legacy taxi companies. Today the cost of a taxi licence in the City of Cambridge has dropped from
$700K to $10K.
- Dr. Michael Stonebreaker https://www.tamr.com/blog/avoid-10-big-data-analytics-blunders/

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So Who is Enabling The Data Steward?
We made the case ML is important
Are any vendors doing Next-Gen(Now) ML?

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The TAMR Agile Approach to Data Mastering
Mastered data
OLD WAY
Rules-based
Source data
Mastered data
Time
Quality
Months to years
60%–80% Accuracy
Modify rules, create
exceptions
Months 1–4
Months 5–12+
Iterate
Machine-driven
NEW WAY
Days to weeks
90%+ accuracy
Source data
Weeks 1–12
Iterate with human-
guided machine
learning
Identify developers
Get business input
Write rules
Review with business
Unified data
Rules

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Selecting The Right Solution

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My Guidelines
Run from Vendors ...
○ that highlight technology features over proving value through example
○ that can only support a one or two domains
○ that can’t offer strong references
○ that offer ‘fully-integrated’ packages (ETL, Catalogue, MDM…)
○ that have not modernized their approach to MDM (still crazy after all these years)
Run towards Vendors ...
○ that focus on business outcomes
○ that leverage modern approaches to MDM
○ that simplify the life of the data steward
○ that make it easy to operate the system

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What is Important?
A B C D
A — Critical Capabilities
● Data Steward Trains The Model - Procedural vs.
ML
● Data Steward Collaboration
● Multi-domain
● Cloud Enabled
B — Important
● Schema Mastering
● Data Quality
● Metadata Management
● Hierarchy Management
● Match/Merge/Golden Master
● Core - Data Catalogue
● Reference Data Management
● Data Modeling
● Analytics
C — Nice to Have
● Master Data Governance
● Data Integration - ETL/ELT/Pub-Sub/API…
● Data Sharing Exchange
● Data Syndication
D — Considerations
● Graph, Big Data, RDBMS, Sparq,
In-Memory, Hadoop…
● Organizational Change
Management Required

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What Do Customers Say? https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/master-data-
management-solutions

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So What Makes a Great MDM Vendor?
Great MDM is powered by people working together with software that efficiently transfers their
expertise into the mastering of data so business can have confidence in the information that
drives decisions
They respect and enable these Data Champions so that their knowledge and time is leveraged as
efficiently as possible
Great MDM Vendors provide smart ways for Organizations to have conversations on live data, and
implement corrections without needing IT

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Thank You!

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Q&A
For a consultation on your data strategy:
info@tamr.com
pbalas@303computing.com
http://www.303computing.com/

41. Confidential – Tamr, Inc.
Be On The ‘Right-Side of The Fence’
Most vendors have moved towards ‘Quick-Winners’
strategies and it’s shaping their offerings