MDM Products – Are they becoming too big to consume?
What existed before MDM (Master Data Management) term started being used so frequently? CDI? EII? Do they sound familiar? If you take out a part (customer-only) of today’s MDM, it becomes CDI (Customer Data Integration). We have been seeing the trend of Customer Centricity and creating a 360 degree view of customer so that there is always one golden record of customer data across multiple channels of an organization. I think the intent is still the same to improve customer experience and increase cross-sell/up-sell opportunities. But, look at these so called 4th generation Multi-domain MDM products. Aren’t we getting more and more entities/domains in MDM products with every new release?
I have been working with a client for past few years where they intended to start with a pure CDI solution so that they could retire their legacy systems (acquired during various M&A) and have one central hub for customer and it’s relationships records. But at that time (about 10 years back) they ended up getting a CRM solution as there were not many CDI only solutions available. While the intention was to create a customer hub and they started with Customer, Account and Location but could not resist to utilize other available CRM entities and functions (Employee, Referral, Team Management etc.). And guess what, on top of all this, customization were done to build Customer Campaigns, Alerts, Know Your Customer Compliance and Questionnaire, Managed Accounts (Value Packages as are known now) etc. in one application. It became so huge that cost, maintainability, scalability and data quality started becoming huge concerns. So, you can guess the next action…Yes, you got it…Break it again! Have a CDI hub and other miscellaneous entities as federated data domains around that customer hub (having Customer data and it’s product relationships and that’s it).
Now, look at the evolution of “MDM for Customer” (I’ll still call it as CDI) products. The way they started vs. the way they look today. Aren’t we getting all the entities I mentioned above (and more) in the same product? Someone looking for a solution to maintain only Customer and it’s relationship data will end up getting all other entities even if not interested (or not needed). Even if some organization utilize all the entities with huge data and transaction volume in the same application under same product, wouldn’t it become too big to handle? So, is there a need for a pure CDI (low end versions) and a robust MDM (high end solutions) products being available at the same time?
Comments
These Multi-Entity MDMs are the 4th generation MDM products which enable the organizations to maintain concurrently multiple, diverse master data domains and relationship between them. But I think this is the way in which the MDM is evolving,.from 3rd generation MDM products which supported single domain master data,today we have these 4th genration multi-entity MDM solution. Shouldn't we think of moving ahead rather than going back to 3rd generation style of MDM products?
With multi-entity domain, we might not need to build integration between the various single entity master data MDM solutions in a organization, as we
can maintain the relationship between the data of different domains in the same multi-entity MDM implementation.
Every organization has multiple domain data to be maintained, like if an organization/business manufactures product; this product has its customer base;the organization has employees; the organization needs suppliers; the raw materials they supply; the vendors; all these are the data which the Business
needs to maintain. Though there is need to maintain all these, the Organization can focus on on domain of data as critical master data.So these multi-entity MDM products can be leveraged in such situations to maintain such a critical master data upfront and along with support to maintain the data from other domains.
As in leverage the multi-entity MDM to get a product-centric MDM solution, and in the same solution have a product-centric view of the organizations major business customers OR vise versa.
Will this strategy not help us to build the multiy entity MDM implementations effectively and use them efficiently?
AAron Zones in his article "The Fourth Generation of MDM" on the information-management site writes as "By centralizing the most
critical master data to a single trusted source and managing this within the context of governance-driven data lifecycle,
multientity MDM provides flexible business process integration across multiple data domains and usage types.
Multientity MDM solutions deliver complex and collaborative business processes, such as identifying the most valuable customers,
introducing new products rapidly, crafting new product bundles more quickly and managing threat and fraud risk more effectively".
Posted by: Ashwini Annigeri | March 26, 2010 7:49 PM