How do I go about setting a successful Master Data Management strategy?
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I find that setting a MDM strategy is one of the most challenging because most organizational cultures aren't quite savvy around this concept. First thing is to understand that org culture so that you know who your positive and negative stakeholders are and make a plan on how best to leverage those stakeholders in the process. This is also an area ripe for bringing in an outside resource to help guide the development but it needs to be someone who has the scars from having crafted and implemented a MDM strategy before.
I started by outlining principles of what I wanted to accomplish (transparency, self service, targeted power users, more consistently right data outcomes) and then sought out people, process, technology to help realize that vision. Its a long ride so be patient.
The first thing I would do is to identify what are the key data elements that are important to the business stakeholders. Next, you need to identify where the data resides, how does it get updated, changed etc. At this point, you can now start to look at your MDM process and technology.
Key characteristics of MDM strategy
Identification of key data and meta data (data about data)
True North of the data source
Federation of data and its management
Create different tracks (depending on the org size/complexity)
Data Ownership -Identify data owners and stewards - maybe a CDO
Data Governance - What and how do you govern it
Data Management - Ongoing data scrubbing
Tool Selection and Implementation
Being Patient... as these journeys take awhile