Value of BPM tool in MDM implementations
Of late, while going through the proposed solution architecture of MDM implementations at major enterprises by product vendors, I see more often that BPM tool is one of the solution components in the overall footprint. The immediate thought I got, was that there is no stoppage of prospective vendors introducing more and more products into the overall solution footprint and hence making things more complex. But recollecting my recent experience of MDM implementation based on a industry leading product for a major bank, where there was no separate BPM tool in place, I started appreciating the value add a BPM tool could bring in such scenarios. The kind of challenges we faced in orchestrating various fine grained services into composite services and the performance bottle necks in calling the services of other enterprises of the systems using the integration layer available within the product, I felt that it makes more sense to use a BPM tool for large MDM implementations.
Ideally this workflow sort of functionality should be available out of the box in the MDM products, to mix and match services, build the validations on top of these services and to route the calls based on the output of the preceding call. The Industry leading MDM products have some of this functionality built in them. But, I found it to be very much limited only to build composite services using their own fine grained services embedding a few business rules. I think they are not scalable enough when we need to call services from multiple systems along with MDM. As an example, for a bank to on-board a customer, it would need to make calls to various other systems like risk monitoring system, CRM system and other ERP systems along with Master data systems. I think most of the MDM packages offer only limited functionality to meet this kind of use case requirements. In majority of these implementations customers build their own orchestration layer to meet these needs. Instead of that, I believe one should consider industry leading BPM tools to be part of the solution to meet these needs. All leading MDM product vendors have their own BPM tools to meet this need. Having a BPM tool in the overall program can bring in the following additional values.
- BPM tool helps in defining the workflow like data flow and help leveraging full potential of the atomic level of services of typical MDM products.
- Data Governance related processes can be handled more efficiently encapsulating the Business rules against the data items spanning across multiple systems.
- Saves effort of Channels building their own orchestration of the services offered by multiple systems.
- Data Cleansing, Compliance related requirements can be effectively modeled as part of the integrated services spanning across multiple systems in the enterprise.
Major MDM product vendors have BPM tools available within their product portfolios and they also support seamless integration of BPM tools from other vendors with their MDM products.
I am looking forward to opinions from people involved in evaluating BPM tool against a typical MDM implementation.
