Page 138 -

102 Enterprise Data Governance

and technical silos. This complexity is kept alive, not because
of objective reasoning but out of habit, in the definition of
business requirements and then implemented by IT
specialists. These needs reproduce the weaknesses of the
existing system without even realizing it because they seem
unsolvable, as though genetically inherent to the company,
which of course they are not.

What is at stake in a semantic MDM system is scope. As
it purports to bring truth to the management of reference
and master data, it cannot but help to also extract the
weaknesses accumulated, sometimes over many decades in
the development of functional and technical silos. It imposes
a takeover of business knowledge, through the states of the
business objects. Business users must describe the behavior
of their IS Assets formed by their reference and master data,
in a way that is not reliant on existing IT tools. IT experts, in
the process of assisting in the statement of requirements,
must supply the methodology and IT solutions to achieve
this, i.e. guarantee a formal management of these business
objects’ states with the help of models.

In the end, the maturity of semantic MDM lies in a
methodical approach rather than in the MDM software tool
itself. Of course, if the tool assists in the definition and
management of the business objects’ states, then the method
is better understood by those involved in the process.
Nevertheless, if the tool contributes nothing at this level it
has to be enhanced in order to manage the business objects’
3
states as master data .

3. In practical terms, this means implementing a decision table per
business object which states, according to the business states, the update
permissions for each data element.