MDM - The Road Ahead
The role of technology in enabling business has evolved from merely increasing operational efficiency to enabling transformations and providing critical business information in an up-to-date, accurate fashion. A couple of years ago, customer and product data was managed locally by individual applications and business units, but enterprises recognize the critical role of a centralized repository of customer and product data that is linked to upstream and downstream systems, aggregating data from multiple sources and delivering it to other applications like CRM, Financials, Data Warehouses, and reporting systems. In the future, we can expect to see customer and product data hubs evolve to enterprise information hubs, where operational systems rely on master data provided by an underlying layer, and exchange information through a common enterprise information bus with analytic applications to realize business objectives.
The reality on the ground though belies this rosy picture. Most organizations are at varying levels of realizing their goal of an enterprise-wide master data hub. Even worse, multiple competing efforts of building data hubs is leading to a scenario where the hubs themselves are becoming silos of information. The concept of a hub of hubs is emerging to address the disparate needs of information consumers in different parts of the organization.
A number of disparate disciplines will also need to come together to achieve success in realizing MDM goals. Data governance, data quality management, data modeling, effective security models, data enrichment and standardization play a role in this regard. Thus, it will be paramount to develop expertise and service offerings around these capabilities.
From a vendor perspective, the top tier might be stabilizing at Oracle, IBM, and SAP, but is facing challenges from innovative players like Siperian and Initiate, whose USP of quick and effective implementations is further reinforced in a cost-sensitive environment. In response, IBM has introduced a Foundation Pack approach to MDM Server, and all vendors claim to provide both transaction and registry style hubs. Microsoft’s EDM product, built around their Stratature acquisition is expected to be delivered this year, and Oracle, IBM, and SAP are moving along their announced roadmap, primarily focusing on delivering an integrated information management platform, coupled with data quality and analytical MDM applications like Hyperion DRM, Cognos, and Business Objects.
The state of the MDM economy is strong with most enterprises seeing this as necessary to achieve their business goals, and in many cases, the wave of mergers and acquisitions.
