New Master Data Management book by Berson and Dubov

[Robert Hillard]

In 2007 Alex Berson and Larry Dubov released their book “Master Data Management and Customer Data Integration for a Global Enterprise”.  It was the first comprehensive look at the field and has been an enormous success in the market.  I personally continue to buy it for my clients to read as a way of explaining the complexity of MDM.   For that reason, I was delighted to receive a pre-release copy of the their fully updated second edition, recognising the ongoing and rapid development of this field.  The new book is called simply “Master Data Management and Data Governance”, taking away the references to CDI which seems to have become comfortably subsumed in the profession by MDM.

The book is a complete refresh, without losing the core content in the original that made it such a good primer on the topic.  There is a new chapter providing different industry perspectives, with specific language and suggestions that will be extremely useful for practitioners in financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, life sciences, logistics, retail, social services, security and government intelligence.  Regulatory requirements have also evolved and the book reflects many of these changes (although the book retains a US-focus in this respect).

Particularly pleasing to me is additional content (and focus given the revised title) on data management and governance, with MDM being treated as providing the tools to navigate this business critical asset.  The book provides a solid set of governance principles (including reference back to MIKE2.0) that make an excellent starting point for most organizations.  Berson and Dubov have also now included support for data modellers including comparisons of approaches and the impact these options have on the overall architecture.

Finally, like the rest of the book, the chapter on vendors and their products has been completely revised reflecting the many changes in the software landscape since the first edition of the book.  Anyone wanting a good summary of available technologies is going to be pleased by the detail provided in chapter 18.

Available from 6 December, I will be purchasing copies for many of my clients for Christmas!



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