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Return on Investment 81

– the value of the Information System is measured via
its assets, finally exposed and measurable, via reference and
master data, business rules and processes. This stock must
be recorded and followed in a new management control
system.

This financial spotlight has many consequences for
businesses and IT managers. The former face the valuation
of their Information System assets. A decrease in valuation
can reveal a lack of control of the reference/master data,
business rules and (more rarely) process knowledge. IT
managers are evaluated on their ability to put in place a new
IT agreement with business users.

This agreement holds the MDM system, BRMS and BPM
repositories in the software development and maintenance
contract that defines the relationship between business
users and the IT department.

4.4.3. The MDM as a springboard for transformation of
IS

The whole transformation strategy is based on mastering
the repositories. The return on investment of the MDM
system can then be measured by the expected value of the
new targeted system. It is necessary that business users
remain vigilant in the way that the MDM system is
perceived by IT. If it is reduced to being seen as an
improvement solution to the quality of reference and master
data, then its implementation risks being atrophied in
relation to the more global transformation objective. MDM is
first and foremost a modeling approach; the quality of data is
only the corollary of modeling efforts.

This modeling must not be specific to the reference and
master data. Let us take the example of a product catalog.
The business object Product is described by more than one