I thought that Connie Moore made a good point in an article regarding BI and BPM: BI vendors are missing out on the “process” end of things. I would go broader than that and say that MDM vendors are similarly missing a trick, and that in MDM it matters more. If you are building some reports then process may certainly have relevance, but when it comes to master data it is central. How does master data get created, read, updated and deleted? For example a marketing manager may want to introduce a new consumer type (as an aside, I discovered to my general mortification this week via garlik.com that I am classified in marketing terms as a “contented grey”, which I suppose was better than some of the painful sounding alternatives like “constrained solo”). This is a new type of master data and you can be sure that a major new type will have impacts on several systems, so will require quite probably a review or two before it goes upstairs for sign off. That process of creating, review, revision and sign-off currently probably happens by email, yet it should really be managed properly by a workflow tool. This is exactly what MDM should be all about, and yet most of the vendors I saw at the recent trade show in London had a look as blank as a Woolworths shop assistant when I asked them about workflow and process within their tools.

Several of the successful MDM projects I have seen make process quite central to the project. A few MDM products have support for workflow, but most are missing out and will need to work with other vendors to provide this, which is a less appealing proposition to customers than having an integrated approach.