Warning: Don't Assume Your Business Processes Use Master Data

Business process management (BPM) professionals understand the need for data but often only pay it lip service, doing little to take responsibility for ensuring data quality within their processes. Data management professionals, on the other hand, drive master data management (MDM) strategies to ensure delivery of a single, trusted enterprise view of data to the business, but they struggle to engage business stakeholders to support and participate in traditionally IT-driven data quality efforts. In parallel with business process and master data efforts, many organizations also build service-oriented architecture (SOA) to deliver shared business and information services across the enterprise. SOA architects recognize both their dependency on MDM to ensure that trusted information is available and the importance of BPM to provide business context for developing these services. If you are seeking to reduce complexity and move to optimization, link BPM and MDM activities to gain "one version of the truth" as a key foundation for business process transformation efforts.