Sunday 15 July 2012

Government Department - Use Case for Registry Style MDM

In a Government Organization, there are lot of departments like Ration Card, Pension Scheme, and Student Scholarship etc. Each of this department has their own data which has been collected while providing cards, schemes etc for the people. Each of this department owns their data and do not want to share the same. To get to a single view without passing the ownership of the data forms a very good use case for a registry style implementation of MDM.

This is the reason why Initiate akka IBM InfoSphere MDM Standard Edition fits very well in such use cases. The UID implementation is again another department and other departments can use that for reference but UID does not own the data for other department. So UID will also not be able to provide a solution of owing the data of various departments. The complete journey of MDM to reach to a physical and transactional style of MDM may be long time away as far as the government organization go.

One another good use case for government organization is the data collected is in various Indian Languages. Initiate has good capability of being able to match when the data is in various native languages and can give very good results. However when the various department have language in various different language, transliteration capability have to be used to convert them into one language for the search to happen.



Fingers crossed to see some of the Government sector realizes and jumps at this option.



Sunday 12 February 2012

20-20 Cricket match or Test Cricket

Any day if a cricket fan is asked what would he or she love to watch given a choice between 20-20 and Test match and 90%(I think) would probably say 20-20 . In fact a Test match has started taking the form of 20-20 and finish off in 3 days rather than the whole 5 days. Shehwag has to be blamed for that probably because of irrespective of what form of cricket he is playing he males century at the same speed. Poor guy he is just doing what he is naturally good at. :-)

Given the age and time that we are in why do we think that a customer would wait for 9 months to see a solution implemented. Talk about an MDM Solution and we say that any implementation will take nothing less than 9 months. The customer has every right to say then “Thank You” and move on. The MDM solution ROI has to be shown in lesser time and the complexity has to be hidden. That will be the point where we will be make exceptional growth in markets like India. The Customers in growth market do not have a huge IT department to implement complex solution and neither do they have a window big enough as 9 months to see the ROI.

IBM has taken a step in the right direction by acquiring Initiate into the MDM portfolio and enables customers to implement the simple MDM solution at the same time and realize the ROI earlier. The conceptualization of a virtual MDM to a physical MDM would allow the customer to see the MDM path and end goal much more clearly.

The IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management V10 is the latest release from IBM MDM portfolio. Find all the details about it on the following URL
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/mdm/features.html

Hope it it a step in the righ direction to convert some of the MDM Test matches to a 20-20 and customers come flocking towards it. :-)

Sunday 22 January 2012

MDM proposition is for Business leaders not IT Department

In market like India, the biggest challenge for selling a product like MDM is the fact that the software is sold to IT department of a company rather than business leaders. The discussion to buy a piece of software or not has still not gone to the Board of Directors or Business leader chambers. The MDM story is approached from typically by fixing the Data Quality issues and ends up becoming a Data Warehousing project along with Analytics losing its advocacy midway somewhere. This is because the customer and their IT department can see the value immediately. However the long term vision of creating a operational hub where the single version of truth can exist is something that can be envisaged as a business need rather than a technology requirement.

Companies need to have business leaders who can vision the roadmap of MDM. Currently the Growth markets customers are trying to solve their day to day problem and the IT Department of various companies are working towards that. When an MDM value proposition is given to the IT department it always gets into make vs buy discussion which becomes an ugly one. The problem needs to be approached as a roadmap where the long term vision needs to be clear. Hopefully these changes soon in countries like India where IT becomes more business driven along with the technology driven as they need to be hand in hand for success. This would lead to more successful stories of MDM in growth market countries like India.