After last post’s discussing some of the pitfalls of leaping into a big data initiative unprepared, I’d like to focus now on some of the less technical reasons why an organization may struggle with data management.  It’s the annoying little brother of Big Data and the the subject that makes everyone’s eyes glaze over when it’s brought up: Governance!  In this case Master Data Management (MDM).  At its core, MDM is a single file, a single point of reference, which links all enterprise data together in a common point of reference.  This is critical, especially in larger organizations with lots and lots of (dare I say BIG) data where the data is shared with different business functions and discrepancies in the data could be problematic, especially with non or poorly integrated applications.

The Gartner reading (G00214129) does a great job at highlighting the pitfalls of paying lip service to MDM, the most common way I’ve seen this happen is putting the onus of governance on the data entry folks.  Gartner states the issues with that are:

• Loss of morale as some users leave the team. IT shared services is not a desirable career move for a lot of “power users” that could have seen line management as their future career
  path.
• Realization that the movement of “governance” from line of business to shared services creates a vacuum in business as those users are removed from any responsibility for data governance. The shared services team “loses touch” with business and so “governance” starts to erode and break down.
• The end state results in the accidental separation of “data entry” (which works well in shared services) and data stewardship that breaks down, since the expectation is that shared services can execute this, when in fact they cannot, so it does not happen.

For bullet two, this happens even faster than most people think, because often time the shared service that data entry is farmed out to is considered IT or contracted out; it’s severed from the business from the onset.

The key takeaway here is that a successful BIG DATA program isn’t simply about storing large amounts of data on silicon. Data should be considered an enterprise resource and it must be maintained so it remains an asset, not a liability, to the business.