The Hub Designs Blog welcomes a guest post by Rob DuMoulin, an information architect with more than 26 years of IT experience, specializing in master data management, database administration and design, and business intelligence.

Most business intelligence architects are well versed in the value of the time dimension.

With query performance and the need to support complex analyses being the two most important considerations in BI, a flattened set of time dimensions provides a multitude of options to represent and standardize time with limited overhead.

It’s easy to see the value of having a flexible, consistent, and integrated representation of time when thinking of business activities. Aspects such as when a transaction or activity occurs in relationship to other transactions, activities, or even pre-defined thresholds form the basis of Business Process Management activities. And accounting departments group transactions into time periods every financial reporting period.

So, how valuable can this same time dimensions be to a Master Data Management solution? If you are well versed in MDM at this point, you’re probably saying “What you’ve talked about so far is useful for relating transactions but it doesn’t tie back to mastering business objects like customers, products, or locations”.

But remember that mastering those objects does require standardization during information acquisition and publishing and that the various inputs and outputs to an MDM system are often diverse. Also, don’t underestimate the value of mastering “Time Tables” themselves as a component in your MDM universe.

First, let’s define just what we mean by a set of time tables before we apply them to MDM. A typical implementation would have two distinct groups of tables to represent time: day, and time-of-day. At the lowest level of the day group is a day-level table with every imaginable way the business can identify a day, such as: by its day of year, week, month, quarter, advertising week (for retail), same day last year (in some special context), or special tags like holiday, weekend, season, positional sunrise/sunset times, or even astrological sign and full moon cycles. And that just covers the calendar view of the business. There is an equally important and extensive set of calendar hierarchies and attributes associated with the business fiscal reporting needs. Add to that every way you want to represent attributes like day of the week or month of the year (number, 3-letter abbreviation, full name) and ending up with over 100 attributes in the day-level table is not uncommon.

Related to the day-level table are hierarchy tables at levels such as: month, quarter, year (and their fiscal counterparts). Each of the hierarchy tables contains all the attributes that define that level and higher levels. For example, the calendar month table would contain attributes defining month of year, month of quarter, and month overall, in addition to quarter and year and all the ways to call the month. Primary keys for the higher level hierarchy tables, like month, would have child entries in the lower level tables, like day, for every entry that rolls into the higher level.

The same holds true for time of day, with hierarchies like hour, minute of hour, shift, peak time, off-peak time, and others.

Because all the higher-level attributes are repeated in the lower-levels, there is typically not a compelling need to join the two tables. The relationships are there for flexibility. Having the various hierarchy tables as stand-alone entities allows you to attach them to business tables at all of the levels you collect or report time values. These tables and hierarchy relationships allow you to easily merge data of different time grains.

The best thing about time is that time is constant. There are always sixty seconds to the minute, sixty minutes to the hour, twenty-four hours to the day (excluding Daylight Savings Time adjustments), seven days to the week, the number of days to the month is fixed, the number of days in a year is predictable. Except for adjustments to fiscal calendars and special events, most of the information related to time hierarchies is static.

BI uses these techniques to conform information allowing it to readily apply to many views of the business… which sounds a lot like the same business issues we try to solve when integrating data within an MDM solution.

Introducing a robust set of Master Time dimensions into an MDM architecture opens up flexibility in how you consolidate information and also how you can apply it to many business purposes. It’s a natural expansion of MDM to include a master version of the corporate calendar (particularly the fiscal calendar) using a common set of time-related identifiers complete with any time references relevant to business operations.

Please let us know what you think of mastering the Time dimension or other types of corporate reference data in the MDM hub by leaving a comment here.

“All NDAs are lifted” were the magic words uttered by Steve Miranda from Oracle at the Fusion Inner Circle Event at Oracle OpenWorld on October 15^th.

Just to make sure, I asked Steve explicitly during the Q&A section of the program if it was okay under the non-disclosure agreement we had all signed to write about Fusion on my blog, and he said “Yes.”

Hub Designs was invited back in February to help Oracle’s Fusion MDM team with some design review, validation, and testing activities. In return for our assistance, we’ve gotten to see Fusion MDM inside and out, and we can proudly say that we are one of the very few trusted partners who helped Oracle to design and develop the application.

We participated in a lot of conference calls with Haidong Song, Oracle’s Product Strategy Director for Customer MDM, and other members of his team. And we attended a week-long “hands-on validation” event at Oracle headquarters in August, looking specifically at the customer data management aspects of the Fusion MDM hub.

My first impressions of Fusion MDM during that hands-on session were very favorable. I remember thinking to myself, “Oracle could almost start selling this into the MDM hub market right now!”

Of course, Fusion isn’t scheduled to ship until sometime in 2010, and there’s still plenty of work to be done between now and then. But the core functionality needed for master data management was there, and the Oracle Fusion MDM team had a room full of customers and partners banging on it for a week without any significant crashes or issues.

There was plenty to like in Fusion that didn’t relate specifically to master data management – the new and improved user interface, the embedded analytics, the modern, standards-based architecture, the usability research that Oracle has done, the improved business processes, the built-in collaboration capabilities …

But the fundamentals of MDM were strong as well. Haidong and his team demonstrated how to import and consolidate customer data from outside sources, and we did our first hands-on lab session bringing in a small customer data load from a desktop file, such as a list of trade show leads.

We also tested a larger volume of customer data being brought into Fusion MDM through the Bulk Import process.

We did another exercise simulating how a typical customer data steward would identify potential duplicate customers, and then resolve those duplicates by merging the duplicate parties.

We also got a good look at the Informatica components that Oracle is bundling into Fusion on an OEM basis: the former Identity Systems matching engine and the former Address Doctor address cleansing tool. Previous Oracle MDM products like Customer Data Hub have had loose integration with Trillium and Firstlogic for address cleansing, but it’s refreshing to see Oracle investing in deep integration with industry leading solutions.

I think there are going to be a lot of Oracle customers who will move to Fusion MDM as the first wave of their overall migration to Fusion, who will see Fusion MDM as a good way to get some early experience with the Fusion applications family, before committing their mission critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to the Fusion platform.

And in 2010 and beyond, I think will be a lot of potential customers who evaluate Fusion MDM positively on its own merits against competitive MDM hubs. Oracle brings a robust data model, open architecture, and a next-generation approach to master data management, with state-of-the-art matching, data quality, middleware, and business process management.

Please let me know by commenting here what your thoughts and expectations are for Oracle’s Fusion MDM hub.

I had a great time at the Oracle OpenWorld conference this year.

Oracle did a great job organizing the MDM track. There were a lot of great presentations, and a good balance of speakers between Oracle people, outside consultants and experts, and end users with success stories to share.

David Butler, Senior Director of MDM Marketing at Oracle, was kind enough to convert my presentation titled “Best Practices in Master Data Management and Data Governance” to PDF format and to post it on the Oracle.com MDM web page.

You can find it in the ‘Partners’ portlet on the right hand side of the page, or just click here.

I had a laptop “near death experience” over the past few days.  It actually started on Saturday (which was Halloween).  So I guess that makes this a “Halloween Hard Drive Horror Show”.

First, my Sony Vaio, which I’ve had for two years, got a little wobbly.  Windows Vista wanted to run the dreaded CHKDSK utility. Things went down hill from there very quickly.

Monday night, I went back to my hotel room after working at my client’s offices all day, and the laptop refused to boot up at all. I gave it my best “I am not a techie” try, and realized this was not something I was going to be able to resolve on my own.  No problem, I thought.  I bought this laptop at Best Buy and was smart enough (I thought) to purchase a three-year extended warranty at the time (for an additional $600).

So yesterday morning, I showed up when the local Best Buy opened their doors, with my service plan number in hand. After a brief wait, I spoke with a member of the Geek Squad. He regretted to inform me that neither hard drive failure or reinstalling Windows Vista were covered by my extended warranty. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their Yellow Pages.

I got really lucky finding D&D Computers in Huber Heights, Ohio.

Brian Dean, the Chief Tech, told me to come right over.  I got there a little after 11:00 am, and was there until just after 4:00 pm. Brian took extremely good care of me and my laptop.  At my request, he replaced my failing 150 GB hard drive with a brand new 500 GB drive, bumped my RAM up from 2 GB to 4 GB, and installed Windows 7 on the new drive.

I had to reinstall all of my applications, which took a few hours last night. But to be back up and running in less than 24 hours, and to have gotten a major laptop upgrade out of all this, was a great outcome. I even got my old hard drive installed in a little enclosure so I could hook it up to my laptop using a USB cable, to access all of my data.

The total cost was $885 ($321 at Staples for the full version of Windows 7 Professional, $500 at D&D Computers for the new hard drive, new RAM and their labor, and $64 at Best Buy for the USB drive enclosure).

The moral of the story: read the fine print of your extended warranty, let your fingers do the walking and make sure you’re current on backing up your hard drive!

At the Gartner MDM Summit conference three weeks ago in Los Angeles, I sat down with Anurag Wadehra and Ravi Shankar from Siperian. I usually go to Siperian’s user conference, which was held last week in Princeton, NJ. I couldn’t make it this time but had a great time at their Spring 2009 event.

So instead, I thought I’d do a blog article on Siperian’s momentum in the last year or so, based on the briefing that Anurag and Ravi were kind enough to give me in Los Angeles.

Siperian’s ambition is to be a leader in multi-domain master data management and since their product is not tied to a specific data model, that’s a realistic goal. Many of their customers find the business problem they’re initially trying to solve does in fact involve multiple domains (or areas) of master data.

Siperian’s most recent fiscal year ended May 31^st, and they wrapped up the new year’s first quarter on August 31^st. Impressively, their license sales more than doubled over the last 4 quarters, and overall revenue almost doubled.

The reduction in dependence on services revenue and the corresponding increase in license revenue, indicates a positive trend that Siperian continues to shift its implementations to its alliance partners.

One of the reasons Siperian wanted to sit down with myself and others in the MDM space was to dispel some rumors that have been floating around about the company. The economic downturn that began in the fall of 2008 has been widely felt, to be sure, and Siperian had significant exposure at that time to the financial services industry, which was one of the hardest hit industry sectors.

But Siperian has done a good job diversifying its customer base into other verticals, more than a dozen total to date, and is continuing to close deals with new customers, extending its footprint at existing customers, and building significant relationships with global systems integrators.

With customers like Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, and Cephalon speaking on behalf of Siperian at events like the Gartner MDM Summit and Siperian’s own user conference, there definitely seems to be a pattern emerging of large organizations with challenging MDM requirements turning to Siperian.

Another trend worth mentioning is that a large portion of Siperian’s revenue is repeat business – customers who have done a successful project with the company and are expanding their MDM footprint into another domain, geography, etc. This speaks volumes about the success of Siperian customers’ current implementations.

Siperian’s “Business Data Director” (BDD) product, launched at the spring user conference, has already signed up more than a dozen customers, with 2-3 already “live” and more going live in the next few months. I was there for the launch of BDD and remain impressed with it.

To a large degree, Siperian’s strategy of scaling through alliances is paying off. Ninety percent of its revenue in the last 4 quarters was partner influenced, with its top four partners accounting for 60% of that business.

I’ve followed the company closely for the past couple of years, and I think their company strategy and product roadmap is solid. Siperian helps keep the “Big Three” of MDM (Oracle, IBM and SAP) on their toes, and has generated a lot of innovation in this space.

I’m sorry to have missed their user conference last week, and I continue to expect great things from Siperian. Please share your thoughts on the company and their products here using the Comments feature.

The Oracle Applications Users Group conference, COLLABORATE 10, is being held April 18-22, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

But the Master Data Management (MDM) track of COLLABORATE 10 needs YOUR help!

This is your final invitation to share your MDM and Data Governance success story, knowledge and expertise by presenting at the conference.

The MDM Track’s call for papers has been extended to 11:59 pm EDT on Monday, October 26; this deadline will not be extended further.

More than 5,000 users, technology leaders, Oracle executives and solution innovators will gather for the event April 18-22, 2010, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

We hope we’ll see you there — as a speaker!

If you’re interested in presenting, all you need at this point is a title, a short abstract of 520 characters summarizing your idea, and up to five “bullet point” objectives.

If you’d like to submit a paper, just send an e-mail to info (at) hubdesigns (dot) com, giving me a brief sketch of your idea. I’ll respond with the URL you’ll need to submit it.

Another strong session at Oracle OpenWorld this afternoon.

Alison Schofield, the Product Strategy Director at Oracle for PIM Data Hub, lead off the session by talkking about the business challenges in improving the data quality of product information, calling it the “greatest threat to your PIM initiative.”

Items are formatted inconsistently, misclassified, with overloaded description fields and lots of non-standardized data.

Martin Boyd from Silver Creek Systems took over to talk about the DataLens product, which Oracle is now selling on an OEM basis on the Oracle price list.

Martin pointed out that 10% of the total effort will be on the MDM software implementation, 40% on establishing governance and documenting the master data architecture, and 50% on data remediation (according to AMR Research, “MDM Strategies for Enterprise Applications, April 2007″).

Data mastering is about “getting your data right” and “keeping it right”.

And there are very few standards governing product data (outside of your product information management system) – all of your legacy systems and outside trading partners are going to feed you a lot of product data of questionable quality.

Martin presented Silver Creek’s DataLens capabilities “at a glance” – the ability to standardize and validation of attributes and descriptions, translate between languages, assignment to popular product classification schema, enrichment with internal and external data. matching and merging, and re-purposing so data can be published in any format for use by downstream systems.

Martin differentiated between tools designed to handle customer data quality and those handling product data.

Name and address data has a relatively fixed syntax, but product data has no fixed syntax. And there are only about 200 or so country address formats, while there are tens of thousands of product types.

Two thirds of companies use manual efforts or custom code, but they say it’s too unreliable (75%) or too slow (64%).

Gartner (and many other analyst firms) have given great reviews to Silver Creek in the last few months.

Oracle’s Product Data Quality Server (DataLens bundled into and pre-integrated with Oracle PIM Hub by Oracle) has been used at large retail, manufacturing and health care companies.

The product’s capability starts with semantic recognition – recognizing the product within the current context – and then you can standardize, match, enrich, and repurpose the data, although those things are quite different for product data than for customer data.

The session wound up with a demo of DataLens, and the integration with Oracle’s PIM Hub.

I’ve spent the last six months on the product side of the master data management world, so I’ve found Silver Creek’s DataLens product very interesting, as it solves a major problem in the product MDM space. It was great seeing the Silver Creek folks presenting with Oracle at OpenWorld today.

This afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld, I attended a great session led by Darrin Pohlman, Enterprise Architect at LexisNexis and MK Rizwan from Infosys.

They talked about the enterprise transformation program at LexisNexis, and the strategic use of technology to enable and drive that transformation effort.

MK started by pointing out the constraints of the single, global instance application strategy. You’re constrained by the vendor’s application architecture, and not all the functionality is best-of-breed across the entire suite. There are inevitable customizations and extensions which pile up over time, which leads to ever-increasing Total Cost of Ownership. It’s difficult to introduce industry-specific functionality, and it takes a long time to introduce new business models or capabilities.

The trend recently has been toward unbundling of the packages through SOA integration such as Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and the accompanying Process Integration Packs (PIPs). Further trends include vendor consolidation – Oracle acquiring Siebel, Hyperion, BEA, etc.

Interestingly, MK mentioned the important of prioritizing master data management, which got my attention, and he mentioned that would be particularly as people started to migrate in the future to the Fusion Applications products.

They went on to talk about AIA, particularly foundation packs, process integration packs and direct integrations.  The foundation pack provides shared services, design patterns and standards. It runs on Fusion Middleware.

Darrin discussed the pro’s of AIA: good reference model for building composite applications, standards-based, extensible for unique characteristics of your business, and where Oracle is eager to demonstrate successful implementations. On the con side, PIPs can be tightly coupled, and the versioning of the AIA foundation pack can depend on specific versions of Siebel and other Oracle applications. Also, there are change management considerations of the IT team. There are licensing and maintenance considerations as well.

LexisNexis is an early adopter of this technology but has to plan for multiple upgrades over the next 12-18 months.

The audience was very engaged and asked some great questions during the session.

I found the session very helpful in better understanding the underlying enterprise architecture and technology strategy that LexisNexis is pursuing, and how Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture fits into that strategy, and Darrin and MK did a great job in explaining the pro’s and con’s of the approach and the experience that LexisNexis has had with it so far.

I’ve always enjoyed the depth and quality of Aaron Zornes’ analysis on master data management. I’ve been attending the MDM Summit conferences that he organizes in the U.S. with SourceMedia since 2006, and I’ve spoken at quite a few of his events.

Today I had the pleasure of hearing him speak on enterprise data governance. Here are some of his major points:

• Don’t settle for “passive” / downstream data governance; instead demand “active” / upstream data governance (please see my white paper with Siperian on this at http://forms.siperian.com/content/PowerGovernancePR).
• Don’t expect data governance maturity assessments to solve all your problems and provide a roadmap out of data governance anarchy.
• Today’s “data stewardship consoles” are substantially less than true enterprise data governance.
• Vendor viability does matter.
• Be prepared to spend $250k-$500k for an initial data governance solution.

Aaron styles himself as the “godfather of MDM” and today was a good reminder of why he deserves that title.

Oracle showed a funny video today in Thomas Kurian’s keynote address on Day 2 of Oracle OpenWorld.

Using a fictional company with lots of systems and applications issues, Thomas walked everyone through how Oracle would solve a lot of those problems.

There were some great customer cameos from companies like Ingersoll-Rand and Office Depot. It was a little on the sales-y side, as Oracle keynotes can sometimes be, but it was well done and wasn’t over the top.

This session was a good reminder of the breadth and depth of Oracle’s offerings in the technology and applications space, and frankly it made my head hurt. I’m glad that Hub Designs specializes in master data management – the Oracle universe has gotten so big, it’s a little overwhelming for most people.

I’ll write more later today on the MDM track sessions.

Having a dedicated MDM track at Oracle OpenWorld this year makes a big difference, in terms of being able to find the sessions more easily and in the focus and energy in the sessions.

First up today was a panel discussion on Hyperion Data Relationship Management (DRM).  It was moderated by my friend Rahul Kamath from Oracle, and included Dongyan Wang from NetApp, Anand Raaj from Halliburton, and Nimish Mehta from Lumendata. It was very well done, and gave some good insights into the role that DRM can play as a hierarchy management tool in an MDM environment.

Next was Pascal Laik, VP of MDM Product Strategy at Oracle, who co-presented with Cisco’s Kin-Ching Wu.  Pascal talked about the reality of complex, heterogeneous environments, and the difference between “push mode” and “pull mode”. He discussed the business drivers of growth, efficiency, IT agility and compliance, and the hard work Oracle has been doing over the past couple of years to help its customers to create their business cases and document the ROI that MDM has been realizing for them. Pascal laid out Oracle’s end-to-end data quality, pre-built integration and data governance strategies, and announced the new Data Governance Manager as a way to Define, Operate, Monitor and Fix data in the hub. Interestingly, 95% of the applications that Oracle customers integrate with are non-Oracle applications.

KC Wu from Cisco discussed their Customer Registry program, which draws data from 40 source systems and publishes it to about 80 downstream systems. She described a fascinating 10-year journey up the MDM maturity model.

The highlight of the next session for me was Bill Miller, a senior IT person at Oracle whom I’ve known for several years, who recently successfully implemented Oracle Customer Hub 8.0 at Oracle. It was very interesting to hear him describe how Oracle has put in place a lot of customer MDM and data governance best practices.

The last session of the day was Vanessa Hsu from Oracle, along with Kelle O’Neal from First San Francisco Partners and Angie Couron from Symantec. They did a great session on enterprise data governance, and gave a “first look” at Data Governance Manager.

I just arrived in lovely San Francisco for the latest edition of Oracle OpenWorld.

I’m particularly interested in the Master Data Management (MDM) track this year, as it looks as if the Oracle team has done a great job putting together a roster of Oracle employees, customers and partners to speak on its MDM products for managing master data on customers, products, financials, sites and suppliers.

I ran into several Oracle people like Pascal Laik, David Butler, and Rahul Kamath at last week’s Gartner MDM Summit conference in Los Angeles (more on that later), and as always, it was great to see them.

I’m really looking forward to this week’s sessions on the state of the art in MDM and data governance, and will be speaking myself on Thursday, Oct. 15th at 3:00 pm PDT. So if you’re interested in MDM and you’re attending OpenWorld this week, please stop by and say hello.

For that matter, if you’re in San Francisco and want to get together, send me an e-mail at powerd (at) hubdesigns (dot) com, or call my office number (781-749-8910) – it’s forwarded to my cell phone.

Hope to run into you in the City by the Bay!

Kraft Foods, an SAP MDM customer.

Hub Designs has two additional passes to the Gartner MDM Summit conference next week in Los Angeles.  You will be responsible for all of your own travel, lodging and meals, but your conference registration would be covered.

Please contact me via the “Contact Us” page on our web site.  To be fair, the first two people (using the time stamp on your request) will get the passes.

Please provide the following:

• Your first and last name (as you’d like it to appear on your badge)
• Company Name
• Title
• Phone Number
• E-Mail Address
• Mailing Address (please put in Message field on web site)

Only complete entries will be considered.

For more information on the conference, please see http://www.gartner.com/us/mdm.

“Master Data Management: The Sliding Scale Between Build and Buy”

Replay of the webinar with Dan Power and Marty Moseley

Please join industry experts Dan Power, Founder and President, Hub Solutions, and Marty Moseley, CTO, Initiate Systems, for this webinar where we’ll outline the best practices that have evolved to support organizations in making the critical “build vs. buy” decision.

Master data management (MDM) transforms data integration and business processes. Many organizations are exploring an MDM solution and will eventually have to answer the build vs. buy question. The combination of build and buy for MDM depends on the individual organization’s circumstances, goals and objectives. As MDM has evolved, so have the best practices for considering how much should be built and how much should be bought.

Some key considerations include:

• What are your current data volumes? How will they change in the near and distant future?
• Are customer relationships one-dimensional? Are you concerned with multiple domains of data and managing the corresponding hierarchies?
• Will you implement Web services? How will they be used?
• Do you augment your internal data with information from external vendors?
• What are the time, budget and resource limitations?
• Is MDM intended to eventually provide an enterprise data platform?

Please click here for the on-demand replay.