Am I being practical or cynical?
Even though I recently turned 42, I still tend to think of myself as a young professional. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I feel overwhelmed by the amount of technical knowledge I don't have. Our profession seems to change at light speed and this velocity is driven primarily by vendors -- not because they are some evil force, but because no one else is driving change. Along with products vendors also tend to drive new terminology and acronyms in order to distinguish themselves from other organizations. The terms most likely to survive are those that are put out for all to use. Those that are heavily trademarked an enforced add confusion to the marketplace, as other organizations are forced to coin their own trademarked buzz.
Another downside of the buzzword biz is that we end up with new and conflicting names for concepts that have been around forever. Nothing makes my mind scream "UGH!" more than reading something that says that some brand new technology or technique has arrived to save us from our sins, when actually the concept has been around decades. I have previously written about my consternation with working with UML modeling tools whose marketing collateral reads something like "For the first time IT professionals have the ability to model data" or "IT has never had an integrated data and process modeling toolset". I have always assumed those groaners were intentionally added to websites to ensure that we old folks wouldn't dare trespass their new, shiny modeling systems.
One of the hottest buzzwords this years is Master Data Management. Don't get me wrong -- I'm excited that business execs are being told by the media that having sufficient data quality is important to their success. I'm also happy to have access to whitepapers, conferences, and other resources to support our data management industry. I wonder, though, what did those executives think that we've been saying all along about data quality. Was it our message? How we said it? How we dressed?
When I read all the MDM buzz, the thing that strikes me is that the 20% new stuff is middleware. So is it really that our tools weren't installed in the right place? Not expensive enough?
Hannah Smalltree's December column "Is MDM All Hype?" in SearchDataManagement.com hits on this very topic:
MDM is "80% old stuff and 20% new stuff," White said. The "old stuff" is technology expanded from product information management and CDI tools, as well as some of the data definition concepts of metadata management. The "new stuff" is a major emphasis on data governance and new MDM tools, which are different from anything the industry has seen before, White said.
Could we use this same tool injection to solve some of our other data and process-related exposure problems? Perhaps we should introduce some middleware, throwing in some governance and web services to make it more prominent.
Jerry Weinberg also has a great saying about all this, too: "The more they pay you, the more they respect you." Perhaps that's where we went wrong, trying to impose data management on an organization that couldn't respect us because our tools are stable, affordable, and easy to use.