Dell

I was hired as a Senior MDM Consultant/Architect by Dell in late 2008 under the Information Management & Architecture group to provide MDM expertise and consulting services. Under confidentiality and non-disclosure I am unable to provide any details about my engagement which completed in July of 2009 (yes, time again for the annual trip to Greece). What I can do is provide a summary of references I found while searching Google which provide the reader potentially relevant landscape information through existing public information.

September 2007 - a reference from Dell on Financial MDM initiative and the use of SOA on the Oracle site. http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/docs/financial-mdm-at-dell.pdf

2008 – a reference on The MDM Institute (Aaron Zornes) showing Dell as a customer of Initiate Systems.
http://www.tcdii.com/initiatesystemsidentityhub.html

December 2008 - a reference on Dell’s CDI initiative from the Gartner MDM Summit presented by John Miller and summarized by Jill Dyche http://www.beyenetwork.be/blogs/dyche/archives/2008/12/dell_does_mdm_r.php

June 2009 - a reference from Oracle in their MDM Executive brief showing Dell as a client. http://www.oracle.com/master-data-management/master-data-management-executive-brief.pdf

June 2009 – multiple recruiting site references for talent acquisition around Master Data Management Enablement and Data Services utilizing AquaLogic Service Bus - ALSB (now: Oracle Service Bus - OSB) and Aqualogic Data Services Platform - ALDSP (now: Oracle Data Services Integrator - ODSI)
http://jobs.monsterindia.com/details/6991360.html http://jobs.monsterindia.com/details/7103559.html?sig=js-1-e8a98fc9f01d868eec37e666f84bf6cf-1 http://www.recruit.net/jobs/1243504796491/ http://www.careerenclave.com/jobs/index.php?topic=43392.msg%msg_id%

I thank everyone at Dell for the project opportunity and worthwhile experience. Our paths might cross again in the future since the Austin MDM market is not THAT large ;-).

Multi-Entity MDM Enablement

As a pre-requisite to successful (efficient and effective) multi-entity MDM solutions, I offer the term “MDM Enablement” and definition below:

The charter of MDM enablement is to identify common assets (people, information, processes, practices, policies, services, tools and technologies) across MDM domains (customer, product, service, employee), and to promote standardization and harmonization of such assets in order to maximize re-use, efficiency, effectiveness and value to the organization.

MDM enablement is sub-divided into logical groupings powered by people & groups who provide common processes & practices through the use of standardized tools & technology. Sample MDM enabler areas are depicted in the diagram below.

MDM enablement has been proven to reduce costs through asset re-use and IT simplification. Some examples of savings include: reduced product licensing, standardized integration, legacy system retirement, infrastructure simplification, streamlined development & support, simplified governance, and reduced training costs. (An article on MDM Enablement is currently in the works).

Pfizer

I found this reference (http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=998 ) on the Pfizer success story of SOA & MDM by Joe McKendrick in his "SOA's role in master data Management explained" entry from back in November of 2007. Pfizer's efforts have truly been on the leading edge in terms of tackling SOA & MDM concurrently. I had the opportunity to participate in this effort in 2007 and manage the definition of the SOA & MDM intersection (the Data Services Layer) across the customer, product and identity domains. Since then and through seeing other implementations, I came to truly appreciate Pfizer's decision to execute this multi-domain MDM solution on a single MDM Hub on the same infrastructure, and leveraging SOA as the primary enterprise data delivery mechanism. If it was not for my newborn son I might still be in Groton CT.