MDM - Can it evolve to stay?
by Venkataraman Ramanathan
The comment from Ray in my previous post cannot be more relevant. The sooner MDM embraces social media the better it can serve and evolve. This is one parameter that will take the game more closer to the CRM+MDM realisation.
It was a hectic day for Michael (young Mike to us) and was traveling home, when he caught in a downtown traffic jam. “Well, why not tweet something for the lousy 15 minutes that I spend here. Let me vent out my ire here” and he picks up his iphone and puts in a tweet – “ Today, at work I found it very difficult to resolve all the false positives and false negatives. This just isn’t the way it should be for what I paid”. Now Michael is a consultant at his firm and has close to 3500 followers on Twitter. Some of them being the vendor consultants and sales people he is constantly in touch with. The next minute, he sees an alert on his iphone that says – “ Let’s set up a meeting tomorrow Mike, to discuss your issues with our product”.
Easier said than done eh? But, not far away too. Recently, Salesforce announced the launch of Service Cloud 2 which integrated Twitter with their CRM offering and moved to KaaS (yeah…SaaS, PaaS and it just doesn’t stop, does it?). The Knowledge-As-A-Service offering allows users to get personalized answers. It also provides Answers from various sources among which the best bubbles up. Will there be a vendor who will provide a widget on the user’s dashboard which shows that its time to re-run the weights for the master data in the DB? But, it is not as easy as saying that MDM should embrace the social media and all the vendors out there start doing that. It requires a lot of stakeholder management and commitment and top management commitment not to forget the business relevance for the industries that they serve.
There are a lot of hurdles, fine-tuning in terms of the offering, evolution of products on offer in the marketplace that needs to happen. Issues today like integration, complete customer end-to-end data updates, better compliance and regulatory reporting are still being hunted by customers. What else can help build the next step to a combined offering? How can CRM help in this direction? What is the impact that the Cloud will have on CRM that will percolate to MDM? As my previous post says, On-demand alone or can Hybrid be a successful model here? More thoughts and rants later.
