Forrester Research published its popular enterprise architecture (EA) trends research, the Top 10 Business Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2012 to 2014.

Master data management (MDM) remains among the top technology strategies that are expected to deliver the most business value. It’ll also require the most change to technology landscape over the next three years.

Going back 2 or 3 years, the anticipated trend around MDM was that it was going to significantly mature as a technology and architecture. It was also expected to accumulate skills, best practices, and methodologies to effectively deliver MDM capabilities.

According to Forrester, this to some extend this materialized/ Based on the research the clients are taking more practical and insightful approach about MDM architectures, best practices, strategies, governance, and vendor selection than previous past years.

The papers identifies two specific trends around data management and governance:

MDM meets process data management

Firms are finally recognizing that there is an unbreakable link between processes and data and that trying to accomplish MDM without accounting for the business processes that generate, govern, and consume the data is difficult or impossible.

Process data management aligns data efforts such as MDM with the targeted business processes, decisions, and interactions that most effectively demonstrate business value from data investments. 

Expecting continued investment in MDM, Forrester acknowledges that the nature of enterprise business process transformation makes progress slow. Technology investments will continue in both MDM and BPM, with leading firms coordinating the efforts and expanding their single-domain MDM solutions (such as common customer) to multidomain enterprise MDM implementations.

The business takes up data governance

Leading firms recognize data governance as a prerequisite to the success of many other initiatives. Accordingly, data governance has reemerged with vigor, gaining newfound visibility. However, according to the November 2010 Global Master Data Management Online Survey, 70% of the 113 IT professionals responding reported data governance efforts that are primarily IT-driven.

Forrester notices increase in the number of programs that are enterprise-driven in which both business and IT participate equally, and this trend is significant. Large-scale enterprise business process, BI transformation, and advanced data quality initiatives have historically delivered below expectations or have failed outright because organizations did not prioritize and take responsibility for governing the business confidence in and trustworthiness of their data. This has been a hard lesson to learn, but the business must participate in data governance for enterprise data and process initiatives to succeed.

Forrester expect companies with good data governance practices to continue to be a minority over the next three years, although a significant and growing one.