Rolling the Sleeves on Metadata/Governance Initiatives

My Impressions and Perspectives on the Gartner® Data & Analytics Summit 2022

 Contents of the blog series:

• Two Years from Now
• The Rise of Metadata
• Governance is Not a Defensive Play
• Rolling the Sleeves on Metadata/Governance Initiatives

In Part 3 of the blog, I covered Active Metadata, Connected Governance, how to get the ball rolling and the future of decision making.

Rolling the Sleeves on Metadata/MDM/Governance Initiatives

Rita Salam and Donald Feinberg presented (“What to Do with Your D&A Platforms? Leverage Data and Analytics Ecosystems for Adaptability, Speed and Lower Cost”)[1] presented that “By 2024, widespread adoption of cloud will raise the CFO’s influence over the chief data officer’s (CDO) decisions due to explicit linkage of workloads to cost, bringing disruption to the CDO role.” I understood that D&A projects will turn into monoliths, their costs will rise, and CFOs will have more weight in the decision-making process:

Given this new reality, the question that comes to us is how do you even get your data or analytics initiative rolling?

I understood Craig Thornton’s session, “Built for Speed — How to Bootstrap an MDM Initiative” [2], to provide a practical guide to address this question. The session inspired its listeners to launch an MDM program in 90 days and to be able connect it to the business value.

The session opened with the paradox: MDM is the foundation of digital transformation and acceleration, but those initiatives often fail, and seem as a high risk, therefore organizations are slow to launch them.

Watch for these red signs stated below when starting your own initiative, work on de-miming them before the launch:

In this session the analyst stated, and I understood that for a MDM program to be successful quickly, “focus initially on an analytical style of MDM often a “360 of something.” 

After you chose your topic, your champion, your team, how do you start articulating the business case? These 7 steps document how to build an MDM business case:

Some of my takeaways from this session:

• Strive for a specific business outcome by focusing on improvement of the specific business process, and not a domain one.
• Budget approval doesn’t mean sponsorship, which you need.
• Look for people in budgeting, forecasting and planning (BP&F).
• Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.
• 90% of the MDM implementation involve consultancy advising or implementation 
• Gartner® advises to start with 4 roles in IT and only AFTER implementation shift to the ownership by business.
• Do not link to ERP Migrations. Push for analytical use cases.
• Do not include data cleanup!
• Use standard data models and OOTB business rules.

In this blog I covered my learnings about the trends in Metadata, Governance and data projects implementation best practices from the Gartner® D&A Summit 2022 which took place in Orlando.

Don’t hesitate about contacting me to discuss these topics or ask further questions. I will be more than happy to hear from you!

[1] Gartner, “What to Do with Your D&A Platforms? Leverage Data and Analytics Ecosystems for Adaptability, Speed and Lower Cost”, Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, Orlando, Florida, 22-24 August, 2022.
[2] Gartner, “Built for Speed — How to Bootstrap an MDM Initiative”, Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, Orlando, Florida, 22-24 August, 2022.

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