Because master data is the core shared information asset within an organization, master data management becomes the centerpiece of an enterprise information management strategy. And any initiative that spans the enterprise requires significant amounts of energy for coordination: identifying the key stakeholders, gaining their support, harnessing participant collaboration, gathering requirements, and establishing the roles and responsibilities of the right set of people to make the project successful. In other words, as an enterprise initiative, MDM requires enterprise buy-in and enterprise participation.

But to deploy an enterprise initiative, one must understand who the key stakeholders are within the organization; identify the individuals who will participate in the marketing, education, championing, design, implementation and ongoing support of the program; and delineate a process for identifying their needs and requirements for the purpose of engineering a high quality master data asset. Before starting to build and configure the master data management environment, team members should perform a number of tasks specifically intended to:

• Identify the people in the organization that can benefit from MDM
• Establish the business value of MDM
• Collect and prioritize the data requirements that will drive the design and development of the underlying MDM infrastructure
• Design a plan for enterprise data integration
• Design a migration plan for the participating applications

To do this, we must work with many stakeholders and align their expectations so that the delivery of value from the maturing master data environment is correlated to milestones along the project lifecycle. In this paper, we look at the different individual roles within the organization that are associated with master data management – and examine what the responsibilities and accountabilities are for each of these roles.

Communicating Business Value

Interestingly, there is a difference between establishing a reasonable business case supporting the transition to MDM and communicating its value. There are a number of ways that a synchronized master repository supports business productivity improvement while increasing the organization’s ability to respond quickly to business opportunities. But since this value proposition is more relevant for achieving senior management buy-in and championship, it does not address drivers targeted internally to each participant and stakeholder.

Addressing this level of stakeholder involvement is particularly important at the beginning of the program in order to assemble the right team to do the analysis and design. People with the most subject matter expertise in each line of business are the same people who will be impacted by a migration to an enterprise information framework. Program champions must be able to engage the business managers in a way that demonstrates the specific value that MDM provides to each line of business.

Because of this, communicating the value proposition for each stakeholder must focus on improving each individual’s ability to effectively get his or her job done. This may encompass a number of different aspects of productivity improvement, including, but not limited to, improved data quality, reduction in operational complexity, simplification of the design and implementation of applicationware, and ease of integration.