What's New in Business Process Management Trends Related to CDI/MDM?
Global 5000 size businesses are rapidly ramping up plans to consolidate "master" data into data hubs using a combination of off-the-shelf data hubs, EAI/EII/DQ toolkits and even custom-built IT projects. One indicator? Within four weeks of announcing the upcoming CDI-MDM SUMMIT 2006 set for March 2-3 in San Francisco, every vendor exhibition or sponsorship option sold out. There is a sense of euphoria in both the systems integrator and software vendor executive suites as these IT firms see the major growth opportunity in selling both the necessary software and the add-on consulting required to hook up the trusted data sources that comprise a customer data integration (CDI) or master data management (MDM) solution. One of the underlying and unspoken realities (the "dark side of data hubs") is that the IT industry does not yet have a clean answer about how an organization can cobble together the various business processes that comprise the corporate data governance processes - i.e., the business process optimization (BPO) required to effect such master data initiatives.
Without a firm commitment to business process management (BPM) or workflow compatibility, these hubs run the risk of becoming "yet another data hub silo" (or as indicated in our report's title - dysfunctional data hubs. Very few large scale enterprises commit all of their applications infrastructure to a single applications package vendor, although many do select a major vendor such as i2, SAP or Siebel as their strategic center of gravity (or COG, as my acronym-crazy friends call this). Without such flexible workflows to coordinate the updates across the differing master hubs (whether horizontally differentiated as customer, product or supplier/vendor - or by data hub brand/architecture), enterprises are essentially rebuilding the same master data files which have evolved over the past 15-20 years within their ERP and CRM infrastructures. And history sadly repeats itself for those IT executives who find such background history boring or irrelevant. Moreover, in the past year, the CDI Institute has had several "type A" IT organizations tell us that they were not interested in the erstwhile leading-edge CDI-MDM data hub products (such as DWL Customer [now IBM WebSphere Customer Center] or i2 Master Data Management) because "we've already built a quite sophisticated 'data hub' ourselves and are not interested in simply migrating to 'yet another data hub' ... what we need is a 'process hub.'" Bingo! There you have it ... the next evolutionary step in data hub evolution.
Process Hubs (a.k.a. Policy Hubs)
When you look at the service-oriented architectures (SOA) adopted by the majority of the CDI-MDM vendors, indeed there lies the genesis of a business policy/process hub architecture. Extensions such as Siebel's Privacy Compliance Management add-on to their Universal Customer Master product are great examples of the simple yet compelling business value inherent in such policy/process hubs. In one centrally managed (and auditable) IT system, the entire enterprise can finally share a key master data attribute (privacy preferences) such that: a) the business is in compliance with the numerous regulatory mandates, b) all applications and entrusted employees have a central, secure and trusted source of such info, c) new applications can leverage this existing shared functionality (shared service model), d) customer satisfaction goes up due to once-and-done business processes for updating the privacy preference, and e) sales and profitability go up as legally the various entities can now cross-sell to each other's customers (can you imagine the unenviable situation of multiproduct or multiline-of-business enterprises that are unable to share privacy preference information between business units? The legal liabilities at hand? The inability to sell or market the corporation's products to its wide universe of customers?).
Clearly, BPM workflows are critical to achieve value from CDI-MDM and to ensure that the outcome of such data governance infrastructure is actually orchestrated across business units and master data hubs. Just as clearly, there are major ROI and other benefits from centrally managing such policies within a single trusted policy/process hub.
During 2006-07, independent BPM vendors (e.g., Intalio, et al) will find religion in the burgeoning opportunities offered by the churning CDI-MDM market - where currently no dominant independent BPM vendor exists. The dominant data hub vendors will continue to fine-tune their own BPM capabilities (e.g., IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server, Microsoft BizTalk, Oracle BPEL Server, SAP NetWeaver) yet not concentrate resources on linking together the policies/processes or master data management rules of their own CDI-MDM hubs with other vendors' hubs.
Through 2007, service-oriented architecture SOA and XML Web services along with workflow standards such as BPEL will make it easier for businesses to coordinate business process flows within and among horizontally differing and brand/architecture differing, policy and/or data hubs.
Three areas to focus on during 2006-07 include:
- Increase the ROI of existing and planned CDI-MDM investments by establishing or enhancing the corporate data governance function to include business processes - not just master data entities and attributes.
- Take the opportunity to investigate BPM solutions from independent software vendors as an adjunct to the missing or weak workflow capabilities of the designated data hub products for proposed new CDI-MDM projects.
- Keep the competition alive between the standalone BPM vendors and the CDI-MDM solutions providers' workflow component by opening up the workflow requirement within RFPs for "other third-party provider" as an option.
