For lasting success, MDM needs an active owner and working with their executive champion in conjunction with as many advocates as you can recruit. Each of these roles is challenging to develop and maintain but essential. They each provide the potential for visibility, failure and advancement within your organization and industry. Said another way, MDM is a team sport.

The Owner Role

This role of the owner may be informal within your organization and can exist within any title. Regardless of the words chosen, I intend to impress the need for ownership. By leading the process of defining, implementing and operating the MDM capability, you will establish yourself as the go-to person for master data for a project or on an ongoing basis. You may be new to the company or have moved internally to assume responsibilities that included MDM. It may be that your role is for a project and have no intention of owning anything.

I advocate for MDM to have an owner as a means for managing risk. It is better to manage MDM incrementally than to risk having to recover its reputation with its consumers and those monitoring its overall cost. An owner establishes someone that can govern it over time and facilitate consistent decision making. MDM systems that do not have a defined owner and transition from one person to the next without consistency of strategy or day to day approach quickly devolve into an unmanageable mess. Maintenance will become increasingly complex, and more significantly, its consumers can no longer depend on the original intent of MDM. Corporately the costs required to maintain MDM will increase, making each additional request for funds about rising costs instead of value.

Long term success will depend on you and your champion establishing a plan for the long-term governance of MDM. An MDM capability will not survive when managed as a project.

The Champion

The MDM champion is an executive such as the CFO, CIO or Executive Vice President of a core function. They understand why MDM matters to the business, sponsor funding and lead adoption. They may be the initiators for having MDM at the company and will play this role beyond the initial implementation. Unless your Chief Data Officer (CDO) has an ongoing relationship with the Board Of Directors, they are not an ideal candidate to be the MDM champion. The champion needs to be accountable for the company’s financial performance and understand how MDM impacts the company; They quite possibly have had prior success with MDM.

Working Together

The champion will help the owner to manage relationships across the organization. Anyone in the company that is seeking to learn more, use or complain about MDM should end up working with the owner. The owner will be responsible for the day to day operation with the long term support of the champion.

Neither the champion nor the owner needs to be code level technical to fulfill their roles but will need to be or be working on becoming data literate. They should understand the concepts of the data infrastructure in an enterprise and possibly come from an area of the business that was data-intensive such as reporting, sales or customer care. They should also appreciate the full lifecycle from creation through movement, and how business processes contribute to and use data.

If your company has a data governance council, the MDM owner and champion will be active participants and members. Should it not yet exist, the owner will form one, formally or informally, through the decisions made during the implementation.

The owner, in conjunction with the champion, will assemble a team with a broad range of specific technical and non-technical skills while the owner will need to be the go-to expert on the topics such as:

• Who is MDM’s consumer

• What is the definition of the domain (Customer/Location/Product)

• Who do you go to for decisions

• What does the company need

• Why is this important to the company

• When do they need it

• What will MDM deliver and when

• Who is waiting

• How can I help

The owner will need the support and coaching of the champion to answer these questions. The answers may change over time, and there may not be one answer for the entire company. The champion may play both roles initially. Unless the company is quite small, the champion and owner should not be the same person.

The developers, testers and analysts will have more technical and tactical questions; Answering them will be informed by the answers to the questions above.