MDM – Is it here to stay?
by Venkataraman Ramanathan
When young Mike called up the Pizza delivery to find out why his most favorite pizza was not delivered on time, it was time to think how important customer satisfaction was necessary for successful brand recall and for repeat customer business. CRM was born. CRM grew to encompass service, sales, support to improve service quality and hence provide a greater and much richer interaction with the customers. ROI swelled, it became the buzzword and lo! and behold - “You do not have CRM in place? I think you need to include that in your IT budget this year. It’s the strategy and vision that will help your ROI” - Years later, when Michael (young Mike to us) went in for a couple of policies for himself and his family he was getting frustrated of doling out his information everytime he had to touch base with the insurance provider. MDM was born. And - “ How can you NOT have a metadata management in place, how do you think your customers will be served better?”. Well, back to Square one, are we?!
For all the inefficiencies that CRM created in terms of not having the master data (now it does resolve your duplicates and automates your sales processes) MDM tries to serve and augment those gaps w/o overlapping the functions of CRM. MDM is evolving and has very good contemporaries to grow with. Cloud computing being one of them. So, from initial custom development, we saw various vendors sprouting up and now we have analyst firms giving various analyses on MDM and the associated vendors. So what next? Is MDM here to stay? Will MDM evolve as CRM did - from custom development-> Product Offering-> Open Source-> On-Demand-> Cloud-> Hybrid->???
Are we in need of a consolidation at this point? Maybe a CRM+MDM in a single offering to our customers? Will this offering benefit our customers with the mix of on-premise CRM and on-demand CRM (Hybrid CRM), coupled with MDM. As per the customer’s necessity can we see how effectively we can use a Private Cloud (more on the private cloud later) that can be strapped on to the public domain so that our customers are comfortable in having their master data on the cloud? The parameters of cost, ease of implementation, offering, organizational impact and ROI is critical to this evolution.
A good example of a combined offering to benefit customers and serve them was when Microsoft and SAP came together to offer Duet (formerly Mendocino). Duet is basically a collaboration between Microsoft and SAP to deliver SAP business processes on Microsoft Office applications. This industry collaboration example paves the way for CRM+MDM offerings and the CRM/MDM industry can draw a parallel from this excellent example.
About the Author
Venkat is a Senior Consultant who works on CRM and MDM solutions and implementations. He specializes in functional CRM and MDM with varied interests in Consulting, Cloud Computing and Technology. Venkat has led the team for the CRM and BPM implementation for a global financial services client. He has been involved in various trainings and organizational activities, besides pre-sales activities.
Comments
We agree that MDM+CRM plus MDM+ERP is true end state goal … not so sure about “public cloud” given our experience with large corporations’ data governance policies, although private cloud is looming.
Thanks for the insight.
Posted by: Aaron Zornes | September 9, 2009 4:47 AM
With the growing adoption of Social CRM and community platforms, MDM's role will only increase. Add a world of on-premise and SaaS hybrid deployment options and you have the perfect storm to take us back to SOA in the next few years. Here's a link to a recent post on this subject http://blog.softwareinsider.org/2009/08/31/mondays-musings-why-every-social-crm-initiative-needs-an-mdm-backbone/
I will respectfully disagree with your Duet comment. Microsoft Office Business Apps and Microsoft Office integration seems to be cheaper and better outside of the SAP ecosystem. In fact, many of us feel Duet has been quite the failure in its ability to roll out capabilities and in its clumsy pricing model.
Posted by: R Wang | September 9, 2009 5:56 AM
With regard to Aaron's post -
Thanks very much Aaron for your view. It so truly seems that the vendors in this space need to have such a coupling (CRM+MDM) as a diferentiator to move ahead.
But, it is interesting to see how a Private Cloud evolves, Aaron. As you rightly put it, it is looming large over this space. We had an interesting discussion between myself and my colleague on this same blog site where Cloud Computing was discussed. Please see here
With the evolution in this Cloud space heating up, maybe the coupling of CRM and MDM is more nearer to reality. One thought on this is the way SFDC has revolutionised the CRM space and looking forward how difficult would it be to offer a MDM solution in the same package?
There could be many a offering like having a dashboard plugin/widget that can show simple statistics of the benefit derived from the existing customer data in their CRM space.
Posted by: Venkataraman.R | September 9, 2009 8:59 AM
With Regard to Ray's Post -
Thank you Ray for your insights. When CRM has been impacted as Social CRM can MDM be far away? As you rightly put, with on-premise, SaaS and as commented earlier and over here, the Cloud is coming our way! It would be interesting to note the architectural offshoots of all these technologies and frameworks coming together to deliver CRM+MDM. With Social CRM in place now you have more to offer your customer since you know MORE about your customer. Will reference this later on a post.
W.r.t DUET Ray, you are absolutely right on the price front. On the final capabilities of the product, yes it has been a difficult path. The reason I referenced this was to bring out the dynamics of the market and the customer space; which no matter what, did bring these two giants to collaborate! Seeing such collaborations has really been rare. But, that said, for an offering like CRM+MDM this is a precursor and a step to move ahead in the right direction to deliver.
Your further views on this are most appreciated, Ray.
Posted by: Venkataraman.R | September 9, 2009 9:15 AM
"MDM - Can it evolve to stay?" I must admit that this is thought provoking. My thoughts are that, viewing MDM enterprise wide is key to understanding it’s role in today’s business. MDM is not just about Customer Data or CDI, it needs to incorporate all key data assets across the enterprise, incl. Product, People, Business Partners, Suppliers etc. This opens up the scope of all MDM programs, and goes a long way weaving MDM into the DNA of an enterprise architecture. Therefore enterprise MDM has a very strong, and long, future ahead.
As for MDM embracing Social Media, it is a must, knowing where and how your customers are communicating re: your products is critical in the age of the ‘Tweet’. Understanding every touch-point that you or your product has with your customer and prospects is a key CRM capability. Whether there is a wider remit that CRM for MDM and social media is up for debate.
Posted by: Charles Blyth | November 17, 2009 3:46 PM
@charles
Thank you for your comments charles.
I still feel this is in its infancy. IMHO, CRM itself still needs to mature much more and MDM is still wanting in many areas.
Stiff competition is putting vendors into vertical solutions and greater enhancements but not moving them toward this convergence, as I view it.
Posted by: venkataraman.r | November 23, 2009 6:54 AM