Benefits of deployment of Master Data Management (MDM) are highly under-rated and come up very fairly rarely in Solution Architect’s mind while putting pieces of solutions together.
An enterprise can gain differentiating value by aligning its MDM and business process management (BPM) projects.
MDM provides consistency to improve the integrity of business processes, making those processes more effective, and productive. BPM is an agile process platform that can provide consistent visibility, collaboration, and governance. By aligning MDM and BPM, organizations can optimize their business performance through agile processes that empower decision makers with the trusted, single version of information, while simplifying integration with transaction systems. Every enterprise process uses data that must be trusted, accurate and beneficial before an organization can use it as information to differentiate itself in the marketplace. Whether human or automated, decisions are only as good as the information that is available at the time they are made.
Nividous has seen tremendous productive improvements in its project deliveries and have ensured ‘Agility’ promise of BPM remains intact. There are several BPM programs where BPM platform is used to create a process layer surrounding transactional systems and applications. In such scenario, it becomes inevitable to source information from one or more transactional systems. In such situations, Nividous have always recommended and used deployment of MDM.
As a result of MDM deployment to source information for BPM from transaction system, integration aspects of implementation becomes highly simplified. This approach not only expedites implementations but later make end solution much more robust and reduces costly overhead of maintaining complex integration. As a side effect of MDM deployment (which should have been done independently regardless of BPM), organization gets core benefits of MDM listed above. MDM is offered by all large enterprise vendors as well as there are some very stable and mature open-source MDM products such as Talend available.
Whether are you are starting your BPM program or you are already in midst of it, it will be worth time investment to think through using MDM along with BPM.