Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
7.1.1.
The foundations of the organization
From the outset, the objective of co-ordination of effort
between business units presents a problem. The difficulties
that the actors in the Information System must face are
embedded in the company's organizational layout. The
business units work with their own processes in a way that
is isolated from the others, with their own Profit and Loss
account. The taste for silos, unfortunate for IT systems, is
already present in the genes of business management:
marketing, sales, production, after sales, accounts, HR, etc.
Each business unit sees customers, products, financial
structure and other information from its own point of view.
These multiple points of view generate wide discrepancies in
modeling. They are so embedded in the management culture
of each business unit that it is difficult to find the
commonality that is sought out in an MDM system. This
effort should be nonetheless maintained and managers
should not be discouraged. It is made even more difficult
because IT itself maintains these unhelpful differences in the
form of functional and technical silos trapping the same data
in different technical structures. However, one must not
believe that all reference and master data can be shared.
Some of them are, quite legitimately, modeled specifically for
the needs of one business unit. Intelligent modeling makes a
distinction between what should be shared and that which
remains specific to a particular business unit.
In this context, how must one proceed so as to agree with
the different business units on a shared vision of common
data? First, one must identify the data owners. For example,
who is the owner of customer description: is it sales
management or financial management? Next, it is necessary
to put in place a transversal task force whose job is the co-
ordination of the data modeling work itself. We will now
detail these two aspects.
