A few weeks ago, those who follow horse racing witnessed a historic event. The race horse Justified captured the Triple Crown by winning the Belmont Stakes following earlier victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes. Justified became only the 13th horse in history to capture the Triple Crown, and the second horse to do so in the last 4 years (American Pharoah captured the honor in 2015). Interesting side note: both Justified and American Pharoah were trained by Bob Baffert. Why does that matter? Because he's a fellow Arizonan native and University of Arizona alumnus, that's why! Bear Down!
While it may be a stretch, the concept of a "triple crown" of sorts has been on my mind recently as it relates to recent Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) projects I've been working on involving Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) and Data Relationship Governance (DRG). Many people are familiar with the DRG module of the DRM product, but when the tool is coupled with two other critical components, you are well on your way to capturing the Data Governance Triple Crown.
As you may know, DRG is a module of the DRM product and provides a governance framework for maintaining your DRM master data. DRG includes functionality such as workflows, approvals, email notifications, and separation of duties (to prevent someone from approving his own request). Workflows are often structured around dimension maintenance and may include requests like "Add Account," "Update Account," or "Move Account." The workflow then guides the requester to select tasks and complete fields on a data entry form. Once submitted, the request enters optional enrichment stages where additional detail and context is added to the request before finally being committed and updating the relevant DRM structures.
While I could go on and on about DRG, I've noticed a DRG implementation is most effective when paired with two other components.
In my experience, DRG implementations are most successful when bundled into a broader data governance program. Data governance programs bring together the Tool (DRG), the People (data stewards, data specialists, data governance council), and the Process (process flows, metrics, and standards).
While there is much more content to dive into on a data governance program that is beyond the scope of this blog, I hope you appreciate the importance of People and Process in a data governance initiative and do not focus only on the Tool.
The third and final component to effective data governance, after the Tool and Process, is integration to external systems. This allows DRM to truly become the master data hub in your company's eco-system and systematically push master data (which could include trees/hierarchies, base members, mappings, or all of the above) to both upstream and downstream systems.
By leveraging DRM's robust integration capabilities and adding in some custom SQL or ETL integration as needed, DRM can produce master data in various forms (flat files, SQL tables, web services, external commits) for consumption by external applications. And these integrations can be run on-demand or scheduled.
So there you have it. Three critical components to effective data governance: a good tool (DRG), a robust process (data governance program), and automated integration (with DRM as the hub).
Are any of these components effective in their own right? Certainly. Each area adds value in its own right and can be implemented standalone. But when all three components are implemented in conjunction, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. Each component presents its own set of challenges and requires close collaboration with both technical and business personnel at a customer. And executive sponsorship and buy-in is absolutely vital to managing and overcoming the inevitable change management challenges. It ain't easy, but like the saying goes, nothing worthwhile ever is, right?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic along with any best practices, lessons learned, or battle scars earned along the way. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
How Does IT Manage Financial Master Data?
Does this resemble your IT person managing your financial master data?
Traditionally, financial data marts and operation data stores are built and managed by IT. So how does the business user view and manage the hierarchies and metadata attributes without IT getting in the way? Coming from the IT side of the house, I have had the opinion that the business might "know the business", but given the opportunity to manage a technical system they will take shortcuts and ultimately bring the IT solution back to a level they are comfortable with…and thanks to Bill Gates, Microsoft Excel ends up trumping the investment in technology.
I have found that there needs to be a bridge between IT and business users. By the nature of a bridge, there is a span that straddles an open gap with the potential if not built correctly the plunge can be a long and 'fatal' fall.
There are many companies offering workflow tools to bridge the gap by helping the communication between business and IT. Alone these solutions still leave opportunity for failure as IT is managing systems it does not have an intimate ownership in. Nor does IT have the knowledge to determine if the business is going to request a change that will impact the system. IT presumes that if the software allows the change than there is no reason why not to do it. As we all have experience one time or another, this is a bad assumption.
Of the many tools I have worked with, currently the Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) tool (formally Hyperion MDM / Razza Dimension Server) fills the gap between business and IT. Using a tool such as this gives a strong user interface that the business can use and buy into while allowing IT to be involved by building edit checks and integrity checks into DRM. Additionally it provides IT the vested ownership while keeping the business from impacting their own "business rules". Not to mention IT's data governance policies are enforced which keeps IT happy.
A win, win for everyone… right?