Doesn't Cloud movement make your MDM investment a must?
Cloud Computing is no longer an innovative idea to be hyped about and then shelved! It’s a big a reality and next generation industry giants are likely be guided by who wins in the cloud. Couple of years back when it was a privilege to be in the cloud has turned out to be a necessity now. Driven by reduced TCO for application conceptualization to build to maintenance, improved agility and QoS is aligning the industry to move into Cloud. On top it transforms your company into Opex based IT spend from Capex model. Recession hit almost at the right time to give it the push it needed for this shift.
Initially we moved from on premise to on demand in SaaS based model. SOA enabled further growth and from SaaS, we saw IaaS – server, storage as a service, then PaaS – even runtime environment is sold as service. Now we call it cloud as whole. Although most of the organizations are still not in the public cloud, especially due to initial hurdles and lack of formalized structure for SLA based payment, security aspect and yet to prove criticality requirement of apps, but the race for public cloud is already ON. It will catch fire once these road blocks are moved aside. Bottom line is cloud movement has started and will not stop until we see some other disruptive innovation coming our way.
MDM programs should be business driven and address business pain points to gain business competitiveness. I would completely agree with this, however I would also see a tremendous impetus to go into MDM program due to next bigger goal of moving into cloud. Moving into cloud, even if private cloud, means:
-You need to ensure that your cloud services are providing the necessary information to its accuracy and without cluttering your cloud space. All cloud based applications need a good quality data and with no ambiguity. Especially talking about the key information asset like Customer data, product data, location data, supplier, employee data etc highly needs to be as close to unique, and as perfect as possible.
-Almost all critical systems, processes need these data and without a cleaner and single truth of data it would be too difficult to move into cloud for most of the apps.
-More over it would not only delay the current apps to move into cloud, but would also hinder new apps to move into cloud. Without MDM, enterprises need to find out a reliable source of data for these key data types, and might need to forge way out with two three different sources. This delay still may be acceptable and may allow enterprise to move the dependent applications into cloud, however on the way it is taking another pain which if not addressed would make a mess out of it in sooner than later.
-Every time a new application development and deployment is needed it would add up to complexity to choose the right service or app. How long should you continue and live with this dilemma/confused source of data?
Instead having a right MDM solution can put this speculation to rest. I mentioned right MDM solution because MDM is not only buying a product and installing it, it has to be well defined and well thought process. It must and should enforce data governance, continuous data quality improvement and business process enablement for better data. Now with such kind of MDM implementation you are one step ahead in the game for cloud movement. Isn’t this a compelling reason
-to go with the MDM program?
-to rethink current MDM solution, and make appropriate adjustment?
-to give MDM a top priority?
I am sure enterprises are over hearing this benefit for some time, however I think it should go as a direct imperative than an overheard or less prominent need! Any thoughts?
