by Ray Wang.

Rob Karel and I recently had a chance to not only visit, but also co-moderate a panel on Data Governance at the CDI-MDM conference on March 26th and 27th at the San Francisco Marriott.  Though master data management/ customer hub pentetration in the enterprise still hovers in the high single digits, its obvious the energy, activity, and investment around MDM continues to grow.  Some quick observations from speaking with attendees and vendors at the event:

  • Clients and vendors overwhelmed most of the hierarchy management and data governance sessions
  • Vendors seemed to outnumber clients throughout the event
  • Clients who came remained at the technical level
  • However, projects were beginning to require a higher level of executive sponsorship
  • Effective change management was beginning to become a critical success factor in all sizes of projects
  • Customer data integration projects (this is biased given the nature of the event) dominated discussions
  • Other entity types such as products and accounts gain importance in ancillary projects

In general this event was a great chance to catch up with others evangelizing, pursuing, and/or implementing MDM tools and solutions.  And as always, it was great to see familiar faces from DataFlux, Initiate, Siperian, Oracle, Pursima, IBM, VisionWare and i2 at the event.  Special thanks to Aaron Zornes at the CDI-MDM institute.

Come join Rob Karel, Kyle McNabb and Ray Wang at Forrester’s MDM Roundabout Session at this year’s IT Forum May 16th at 11:45 am in Nashville, TN

Event Details

Tech quote: "Life is like an outer join, you never know what row to expect…"
Real life thought: “If software vendors built airplanes, would you dare to fly?”

R “Ray” Wang | Principal Analyst | Forrester Research, Inc.

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rwang@forrester.com | (650/581-3808 | Fax: 617/613-3077 |
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Warmest regards,

-R