It’s an excellent question, Jackie. Maybe one day I’ll be smart enough to actually to know the answer.

Give me an older system with good data over a newer one with garbage any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Expectation management is one of the challenges of “new systems” and new “software products”. The marketing material, and the business case always highlights what the new system is, undoubtedly, CAPABLE of doing.

The marketing demo shown to the senior execs, always uses pre-populated sample data, to illustrate the wonderful capabilities of the new system.

The fact that a new system is CAPABLE of accepting perfect data, and CAPABLE of generating wonderful results, on the basis of perfect data, is no indication of what the new system will ACTUALLY do.

Most new systems need to be populated by a Data Migration project. Failing to plan data cleansing of the old data is shockingly common place.

Then senior execs express surprise when the “new system” fails to live up to their expectations….

Some “new systems” are required for regulatory compliance reasons (Anti Money Laundering, Solvency II, etc. ). Regulators are beginning to seek evidence of the data population processes – I cite some examples on my blog.

Rgds Ken

I think people take data for granted like we do hardware. Not to mention, how often and long do people talk about the UI features they want? It’s more tangible to business users, somehow?

In the end, it’s always going to be there and we need to be slick in the ways we try to prevent it and clean it up when it does happen.

I completely agree with your reply to William.

The attitude too often taken is: “Our job is to implement the new system, not clean up someone else’s mess”.

Ken

2. should verification at source (contact for address or manufacturer / supplier for product) be required at initial setup of the data in the system or maintenance scheduled as part of the data governance program? – yes, otherwise what are we governing and by what laws/rules.

3. Is the data incomplete? – yes, often address data is incomplete or invalid. Either is insufficient to become information.

4. Does the MDM process include a question / answer scenario to complete the data? – I believe so. This is the voting portion of the governance initiative, functioning as the business’ chance to manage its own information.

Great post Jackie!! Keep it up! I’ll be mulling these questions over and forming a blog post soon!

The classification of maintenance items is a challenge especially when you are working at multiple manufacturing facilities where the terminology and classifications are localized. We set up the standards, provided a clean classified and attributed record verified to the manufacturer of the component to the plant which improved our ability to standardize the MRO data up front. Part of our work with the maintenance and engineering departments was to set up synonym search capabilities which enhance the ability to find a part.
Jackie