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Testimonials from the MDM Alliance Group

“Master Data Management and Information Management are key disciplines in any Company Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture initiatives. The MDM Alliance Group is delivering some solid added value in these areas by releasing these procedures in the public domain. Excellent work.”
Didier BOULET
Director SOA - THALES Corporate - KTD/Software


“Pierre Bonnet's book on Master Data Management and Semantic modeling is a timely and comprehensive guide to creating solid foundations for Master Data Management within the company. The semantic approach to modeling master data represents an important step toward building industry specific standards and therefore massively reducing the risk and cost of Master Data Management projects. To have Pierre's extensive architectural knowledge and vision within this area in print is a must for anyone embarking on a Master Data Management initiative.”
Owen Lewis
Director Product Development - Agile Solutions Ltd


“The data explosion in term of volume and transactions has crystallized new paradigms such Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Cloud Computing and other model such SaaS. In such a massively distributed environment, completely virtualized and ubiquitous, the quality of data, their localization and transactional integrity will be dramatically critical. Another dimension of business that is magnifying the effect of the vectors described above is the breathtaking acceleration in the swiftness of business change that is forcing companies to rethink the manner in which they manage their critical data and information.”
“Rethink it means making a conceptual leap into this new economic model which means that companies will need to be guided in order to successfully achieve their transformation, thus increasing their competitive advantage.
The MDM Alliance Group is an initiative that will guide any company of any size to go through the transition phase in order to reach their goal. The modeling coupled with the semantic approach is an extremely powerful tool to increase the transparency of critical and valuable data while at the same time reducing the complexity of the architecture and multiplicity of interactions. The MDM alliance also provides tools and business templates for accelerating the learning and the operational effectiveness of companies. Bear in mind that data, since the beginning of mankind, has made and broken up empires and, from that view point, nothing has changed except that today data is more important than ever due to the speed of business change, which means that any company must safeguard its highest competitive asset: data.”
Didier MAMMA
Director EMEA Strategy & Development - Progress Software S.A.S.


“The majority of companies have taken the steps towards a better management of their data capital or reference data. They are all looking for reassurance and want to benefit from the thoughts of others.
The MDM Alliance Group therefore brings an essential networking aspect, which is at the base of all good business practice for companies wishing to start a reference based management project. Atos Origin firmly supports the MDM Alliance Group.”
Laurent Schapira
 BI, CRM & MDM Solutions Manager - Partner Atos Consulting


“The MDM Alliance Group is a debating forum, a think tank that prevents us from re-inventing the wheel. The modeling procedures and the ready to use data model help progress from state of the art to the reality of company projects.
The MDM Alliance Group is an accelerator helping to free the players involved be they users in industry or IT. Its contribution to the maturing process in the MDM market is well and truly established.”
Clément Roudeix
Director, BI & MDM, Financial Services – SOPRA group


“I have come from a traditional data modeling background where languages were not commonly used, so I have been trying to find some unbiased guidelines that would enable me to express my intentions in a more formal and universal way.
 The explanation and examples given within the MDM Alliance Group documents have greatly helped me in this goal. They have enabled me understand just how potentially wide ranging and valuable MDM is.” 
Graham Chapman
Senior Enterprise Domain Architect: Information Enterprise Architecture at Inland Revenue, New Zealand


 “Time (or money) to market a solution seems to shorten as we age. Should we waste in modeling? Think of the data silos “galaxy” accumulated in less than 20 or 30 years of data processing within your own organization, and ask why? It has been disorganized to such extent because nobody wanted to pay the bill for modeling upfront...so, everybody had to pay anyway, but afterwards (data transformation, data migration, data redesign etc.).
Data (and even more master data) is your asset. It is like your money in the bank. You may not have plenty initially but you most probably want it there for as long as possible. If you leave your safe on weak foundations, you will keep rebuilding and soon discover that everyone around preferred to use the bank as a service instead. Can you still afford to remain alone in your data mastering? Standards bodies like OASIS and others progressively deliver prebuilt vertical models like UBL, CIQ, ACORD, HL7 etc. However, those are intended for data flows and do not fit for data implementation. Packaged solutions (like SAP, Oracle Application, etc.) also provide out-of-the-box configurable data implementation schemas.
However those implementations tend to embed most of your master data (from the package prospective only), thus preventing us from keeping an homogeneous level on data quality, control and governance in the overall IT eco-systems. The same pitfalls apply if your try Corporate Services in SOA before data mastering. This book is a great opportunity for re-use from past experiences and capitalize on state-of-the-art pragmatic modeling techniques. Beyond is the MAG initiative which is a way to not only avoid the blank page but mostly to provide added value from all of us, as long as we all play the fair game of an open collaborative effort.”
Xavier Fournier-Morel
Co-author of the SOA Architecture Guidelines


“MAG is a community Pierre Bonnet founded to share MDM Modeling procedures and pre-built data models. The MDM Alliance Group publishes a set of pre-built data models that include the usual concepts (Location, Asset, Party, Party Relationship, Party Role, Event, Period [Date, Time, Condition]) downloadable from the website. And some more interesting models like Classification (Taxonomy) and Thesaurus organized across three domains.
Although we may disagree about the semantics I do agree with him that adopting this approach can help us avoid setting up siloed master databases…unfortunately often evident when using specific functional approaches such as PIM (Product Information Management) and CDI (Customer Data Integration) modeling.”
James Parnitzke-James
James is a hands-on technology executive, trusted partner,
advisor, software publisher and widely recognized database management and company architecture thought leader


“The MDM apparatus (it's a lot more than just technologies), is a fundamental component to guarantee that a Company Architecture is translated to an efficient IT system. Moreover, without a correct MDM vision implemented at the four levels (semantic, logical, organizational and technological, see the Praxeme aspects) a Company Architecture may be a complete failure and a total waste of money. The MAG work (method and pre-built models) is an invaluable step in our search for rationality for the IT system we are building for the near future.”
Fabien Villard
Secretary of the Praxeme Institute


“The Praxeme methodology, “Sustainable IT Architecture“ and especially Master Data Management have helped me in consulting with various organizations in service-oriented architecture, as well as in implementing the process of IT system overhaul. I recognize the MDM Alliance Group as a precious source of information and exchange platform for methodology.”
Jay Zawar
Independent Consultant in SOA


“The correct management of a unique set of data repository is key to the company's agility and financial performance. The MDM Alliance Group clearly demonstrates that this is a business opportunity.”
Emmanuel Laignelet
Director of Evolan Solutions – SOPRA Group


“A reference book, that gives new found importance to companies’ IT heritage. In this book, Pierre Bonnet answers the concerns of IT architects giving a strong methodological framework for the management of data repository. He puts the data at the heart of the business in perspective and gives an efficient and pragmatic approach resting on a sure-footed base, the corner-stone of business data repositories.
In this book IT architects will find, the keys, a guide in the analysis and structuring in four layers (semantic, pragmatic, logic and software) and a collaborative approach (business/IT) which will help make their first MDM project a “success story.”
Olivier Sommerard
Technical Director  – KHIPLUS


“Today a large amount of energy is expended to maintain, for better or worse, the quality of data. Whether this be in terms of data cleansing or data integration. But it is also necessary to take into account from the SOA point of view the wasted effort in the access management to the data. One can only fear that duplications of codes on the lowers layers of SOA can only lead to the same in the upper layers.
From the point of view of reference data (data used or produced by several applications), from the moment a drive is made to increase quality and reduce costs, standardization is mandatory. Time and time again this principle has been shown to be true in many industries.  Without doubt it is time that the software industry takes into account this standardization at the level of reference and master data management.
The logical consequence of this statement is that we can only wish for the normalization of the reference and master data.
In this framework, the processes of the MDM Alliance Group, that is to say the semantic modeling of the MDM and the pre-built data models, will almost certainly become, progressively, a must. An ambitious goal, certainly difficult but promising, being that it offers off-the-shelf models.
Even supposing that these pre-built models cannot be used as they are with our respective IT systems, they do have the advantage of giving us the opportunity to personalize our model without having to start from scratch, an approach which is often costly and reliant on a knowledge base for re-use. The approach certainly merits a trial.”
Jean-Pierre LATOUR
Company Architect – SMALS


“There is an intense worry about the reliability of the KPIs and the reliability of the risk indicators. Because of this, it is not unusual that the same KPI on the one hand supplied from the production data base and on the other from BI do not have the same value. Which one is correct? The explanations by Pierre, on the quality of the data repository and by extension on the quality of operational data are totally convincing: It is possible to correct this state of affairs thanks to MDM. Starting an MDM project is attainable: Both methods and tools exist. Pierre explains them very clearly. It is clear that this work is a contribution that cannot be ignored and which is of great value, to the good management of an MDM project.”
Antoine Clave
Information Systems Consultant – FIABILIS


“Master Data Management is a key technology to ensure the consistency and integrity of IT systems. Pierre Bonnet, who is a renowned expert in this field, provides a global view within the company and it’s IS. In his book “MDM and semantic modeling“, he introduces modeling techniques in order to define the best architecture and MDM usage for each IS, thus paving the way to IS maturity improvement.”
Philippe DESFRAY
Director R&D – SOFTEAM


“I have met Pierre Bonnet “virtually” on an MDM related Linkedin group. This allowed me to discover and join the MAG initiative wholeheartedly. Although a long time database professional (from DBA to Data-base Architect), my exposure to MDM started only a few years ago, with an IBM MDM “draft” solution, while I was involved in “architecting” an analytical DWH model, based on an operational ODS/ETL model, integrating a 3rd party CRM package, and complying with global, corporate wide reporting requirements. My first impression, outside the “siloed” legacy (mainframe) world, was the semantic “chaos” introduced by the brave, new and open, distributed platforms, applications and database management systems. Beyond the versatile XML, the MDM (metadata management) was not standard, not accepted, but even had a lukewarm reception from the majors (IBM, MS & Oracle). It was clear that MDM was something else, a few abstraction layers higher, definitely aimed at the business alignment of the data and application semantics. SOA was hot and it promised relief to IT of all the legacy (mainframe, that is) pains. It is less hot now, but it is more mature and it has become absolutely clear there is no IT alternative to it (sic!).
While becoming an architect (an alliteration for a seasoned systems engineer, with the stress on both terms) entering the marvelous Company Architecture (Zakman's) World I've realized that architects have missed one point: legacy (including new technologies, from MS, Oracle and IBM, among others) was not present explicitly, while (passive) data or (actionable) information were persisted tremendously, all over the place, like in a (flat) Babel Tower. The (world of) IT was (is) flat (courtesy to T. Friedman). The answer to that lack of “dimensions” was (already) there: Master Data Management - that business's own lingua franca, that IT should translate into local platform MDM “dialects“, ensuring the long-time aimed “integration” and “interoperability” of heterogeneous databases and applications.
To my “beginners” experience, Pierre Bonnet has provided the SOA “basics” and he has promised the next and complementary book on MDM “all-you-can-eat”. The MDM Alliance Group (MAG) is the “place to be” and to discuss the future and mature MDM, tied to help business to seamlessly integrate and inter-operate data and information. Thank you Pierre!”
Nick Manu
Architect and DBA DB2 zOS & Linux, Crossroad Bank For Social Security, Belgium (eGovernment)


“Pierre is an expert in the MDM domain and understands well the intersection of SOA and MDM which is a rapidly emerging topic in Company Architecture. His work on “Sustainable IT Architecture” is an important contribution to the field. As more companies seek to extract the maximum business value of the existing and ongoing investments in IT, the sustainability model helps to coordinate stakeholders and to establish a higher level of functioning for today's much maligned IT department. The integration of MDM into the SOA conversation reflects a mature understanding of the reality of Company complexity, but also provides a path forward for Architects and Practitioners alike.”
Miko Matsumura
Vice President and Deputy CTO at Software AG – author of 
SOA Adoption for Dummies


“Pierre has delivered, over a few short years an impressive amount of guidance and best practices, be it with his colleagues at the Praxeme Institute, or by founding the Sustainable IT Architecture and MDM Alliance Group communities.
His vision tackles courageously the problems that IT has been facing for well over a decade now and he is offering an innovative, clear and proven path towards agility. He was one of the first ones to associate SOA and MDM, and more than that to provide a complete articulation between MDM, BPMS and BRMS as part of the Agility Chain Management System.”
Jean-Jacques DUBRAY
Co-author of  OASIS ebBP, SCA. Author of  SDO Specifications and Composite Software Construction


“An essential step for those who wish to significantly improve (in other words, modernize) the agility of their IT system, the creation of a master data management foundation, an apparently simple issue, can come up against problems which could cause the failure of its implementation. Functional architecture, IS integration (exchanges) modeling..; but also organization around data (governance) and potential added value exploration are some of the elements to be seriously considered once taken on. Through their recommendations, fully shared and added to by Micropole Univers, the MDM Alliance group delivers the Best Practice enabling the try conversion! ”
Lilian JOUAUD
Director, Company Information Management - Micropole-Univers