Book Image

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services

Book Image

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Politics and organizational changes


Earlier in the chapter, we gave a one sentence definition of Master Data Management, which included the phrase 'tools and processes'.

The 'processes' part of MDM is a very key point. While this book is obviously about a technology product—you will not get far with implementing an MDM program by just focusing on MDS as a product. The same could probably be said to an extent for implementing any product, but it's particularly important when implementing Master Data Management.

The reason that the processes part of an MDM program are so important is due to the sheer number of systems and people that are used to interacting with the master data entities in the way that is relevant to their own need and use.

As we saw in the overall plan for an MDM program, one of the tasks is to produce a standardized entity model which will be initially fed from a number of different source systems. When this is carried out, the entities and the attributes will be conformed and standardized to mean the same thing. This could be for the actual names of entities and attributes, or for the actual attribute values. For example, the Customer entity may have an attribute of 'Industry' in one system, and this may be renamed in the new master data model as 'Market Segment'. Users who have been used to seeing an attribute called 'Industry' in their applications may not be happy with the renaming of the attribute. In a similar vein, the actual values of the attributes will be standardized, so users of the same application could see the segment of 'IT and Communications' change to a segment of 'IT', with a new segment added called 'Communications'.

As these issues have the potential to cause unrest in the organization, strong sponsorship at the executive level is needed to sell the benefits that an MDM program can bring.