Emerging MDM Trends Part 2: Aligning MDM and BPM

Emerging MDM Trends Part 2: Aligning MDM and BPM

In Part 1 of Emerging MDM trend series, I discussed about Multi-Domain MDM. This is second post in this series and here I will give you my views on aligning MDM with Business Process Management (BPM).

To be able to understand how MDM integration with BPM can bring value to an organization, we need to first understand some of the core capabilities of BPM.

Apart from the basic value proposition being the ability to process ‘more with less effort’, BPM is set of software and services which allows

Efficient handling of processes and changes
Meeting the challenges of dynamic business climate
Collaboration between business and IT
Agility by giving more control over operations

Let’s now see how each of these characteristics of BPM compliment MDM.

Efficient handling of processes and changes

Typically, every organizational process is a set of tasks which are orchestrated towards achieving an end result. The key here is the decision which takes place after each task. Depending on this decision; a BPM workflow leads us to next logical step towards achieving the end result.

By integrating BPM with MDM, you can create an efficient process around customer, product, location and other master data entities to simplify data management. For example, a simple new customer creation process may have 3 tasks. Search MDM to see if customer record already exists in MDM, if yes, update the customer information else add a new customer record.

Meeting the challenges of dynamic business climate

Organizational processes can be dynamic and BPM brings significant value by allowing re-orchestration of tasks to handle change. BPM takes rigid independent processes and transforms them into flexible, choreographed business services that work together to create a great business value. This allows organizations to adapt to a fast changing business climate.

The reality of our earlier example of creating customer record is that it actually has more tasks than just search, add/update. A simple workflow of a banker working with a customer might involve many tasks such as, opening a checking account, adding a mailing address, update phone number, capture email address, offer a credit line etc. The most challenging part of this flow is that these tasks can be very dynamic in nature and change depending on internal company policies as well as external compliance requirements.

Collaboration between business and IT

A major failure point for MDM is our inability to run it as a joint effort between IT and business. Bringing MDM and BPM together not only helps us avoid this pitfall, but also helps us in bridging the gap between developers and business analysts (BA). With the help of workflows and graphical development process (drag-and-drop techniques) built into BPM suite, business analysts can create process design aided by MDM service mapping to support different operations to be performed on master data.

In our earlier example, although IT plays a key role in development of MDM services, you need to tap the expertise of your BA’s who have the knowledge of the current processes to define which operations(or MDM services) to use and what rules to apply on customer profile. Once this process is choreographed, development team can than ensure correct CRUD operations are performed in each of the task in the customer creation/updation process.

Agility by giving more control over operations

With BPM you can make continuous improvement instead of attempting to reach the ideal state with one huge jump. Essentially, a BPM project follows an iterative approach. Business provides definition, rules, policies and procedures to manage data which developers use to create models. The change in rules can be applied to development process rapidly rather than redesigning the entire system.

In our customer creation process, say there is a new compliance requirement to validate every mailing address created in the system. A new story card with several small tasks can be created to re-orchestrate the business process. Each team member involving BA’s and developers can than accommodate the change in an agile fashion followed by signoff from the business owner of the story.

There are more reasons to bring BPM and MDM together than what has been discussed here. That includes master data governance, stewardship and data quality enforcement capabilities. In an effort to keep my posts simple and short, I will explain more on this in future posts.

Please share your thoughts via comments.

COMMENTS

3 Thoughts on Emerging MDM Trends Part 2: Aligning MDM and BPM

Pascal ANTHOINE

23 Oct 2013

4:54am

Hi,
your article is very interesting.
But I have some questions. Why don’t you speak about workflow engine included in the majority of MDM solution ?
Do you see no different approach between very simple processes limited to manage Master Data, and some business processes with multi source and link with unstructured documents ?
What is the impact on system agility when you have two modules ? For example, when we have to add a new attribut, we have to modify two systems (MDM, interface (?), and BPM processes and screen )
Thanks again for your article

Arun K Singh

24 Oct 2013

12:10am

Purpose of BPM and MDM are quite different. MDM would be a process element which will be fitting in the overall process of BPM.

MDM systems also have workflow inbuilt into this. The workflow will typically be used for data stewardship and resulting in creation and managing the Golden Record.

whereas BPM processes are more of Business Activities ranging multiple department and users..

Dmitri Korablev

5 Nov 2013

5:29pm

Prashant,

Thanks for the article and the insight. Without an argument, I see more and more customers tying their BPM and MDM implementations together. The examples that you used here however are often just a starting point to realizing the full potential of these 2 enterprise technologies.

The most compelling business value proposition is not how you can define the workflows to curate the data and manage exceptions. That is taken for granted these days. It is all about how the business processes that connect systems and information silos need the solid infrastructure of the reference data, key entity and relationship definitions across all major domains to deliver the predictable outcomes and the business value.

Classic examples are order-to-cash, quote-to-order, customer on-boarding, etc. BPM guys get when you are half way through that sentence. At the end of the day, this all rolls up to how well your BPM and MDM solution can work in a heterogeneous environment to enable the new generation of apps.

As far as agility is concerned, the key is a solid meta-data management foundation that allows to track changes across all systems involved.

Keep up the posts.

MDM – A GEEK'S POINT OF VIEW