Mark Allen is co-author of the book Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and is a senior IT consultant and enterprise data governance lead at WellPoint, Inc. Before joining WellPoint, Mark was a senior program manager in customer operation groups at both Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation. At Sun Microsystems, Mark served as the lead data steward for the customer data domain throughout the planning and implementation of Sun's customer data hub. Mark has over 20 years of data management and project management experience including extensive planning and deployment experience with customer master initiatives, data governance, and leading data quality management practices. Mark speaks at Data Governance and Information Quality (DGIQ) conferences and has served on various customer advisory boards focused on sharing and enhancing MDM and data governance practices.