Why Master Data Should Start with the Business Process, Not the ...

Jignesh Shah (@jshah0209), Software AG?s vice president of business infrastructure products and solutions, discusses with IT Business Edge?s Loraine Lawson the benefits of taking a process-driven approach to master data management, as opposed to a data-driven approach. (In the interest of disclosure, this month Loraine Lawson began writing for B2B.com, a business-to-business site owned by Software AG and overseen by Shah?s division. However, this interview was scheduled in response to an ITBE blog post Lawson wrote on marrying BPM with MDM.)

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?People often equate BPM with automation of processes. There are processes that do lend themselves to automation, but there are many things that you can do to a process that have nothing to do with automation ...?

Jignesh Shah

VP of Business Infrastructure
Software AG

Lawson: I know that in 2010, towards the end of the year, Software AG ? which is known for its BPM tool ? bought Data Foundations, an MDM company. How do you see BPM and MDM coming together?

Shah: What?s interesting is that the process-driven MDM story at Software AG precedes Data Foundations, and not a lot of people know this because it actually stems from the IDS Scheer side of the house. Definitely we put process-driven MDM messages on the forefront for the Data Foundation acquisition, but IDS Scheer, which became a part of Software AG in 2009 and has been around for about 20 years, has been doing process-driven MDM for about 15 years.

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IDS Scheer started out as a process improvement company and a lot of their practice around process improvement was around SAP implementations. So they took a very process-driven approach to implementing SAP.? They would document customers' processes, how they could be changed, modified, automated, and then use all that information to then guide the implementation of SAP systems and modules.

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Even with SAP, the databases and the data models are not homogenous, so frequently they would implement master data management within SAP modules or between SAP modules and other systems that clients may have. And guess what? Being a process company, they adopted a process model to do MDM as well. Initially, it started out as an extension of just process thinking, but very soon they actually had developed a whole methodology and discipline around how MDM can be implemented and tied to process improvement initiatives. It?s a six-point methodology starting from strategy, organization, process, data, applications and governance.

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The article that you wrote and some of the things that Andrew White of Gartner writes, they often kind of equate process with BPM, which maybe it?s true these days, but you know processes have been around as long as we?ve had the human race, right?

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So, BPM and processes are not one and the same, is the point I?m trying to make. And IDS Scheer was doing process improvement before BPM became fashionable and they?ve been doing process-driven MDM before people started talking about marrying BPM and MDM, shotgun or otherwise. So that?s the backgrounds. So we?ve been doing this part of the initiative for about 15 years, and then when we acquired in 2010 OneData, it just made natural sense to say, ?Hey, we?re going to go to market with this tool and with the methodology that we have developed over the last 15 years as a combined, unified offering,? and that?s how we came about the process-driven MDM message, the process-driven MDM dummies book and that?s how we go to market these days.

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