Customer Relationship Management

One wonders how those C-level executives would have responded if PwC asked, "What could your company do to improve the value and usability of its data?" Chances are most would have merely shrugged. From the executive suite down through business analyst ranks, too many business users feel powerless in obtaining the accurate, reliable information they need, or they spend untold hours hunting for it across disparate systems.

If you mention a term like "master data management " or "MDM" to a non-technical business user, you're likely to get a dazed look. But if you showed business users how they could easily access and use trusted, reliable master data (such as data about customers, products, channel partners and the relationships between them) to do their jobs better, you'd get a different reaction.

The fact is that MDM isn't rocket science. The IT crew does need to do the technical-level implementation and establish connectivity between an MDM repository and the applications from which it will source data, but after that, business users can get into the driver's seat. Today, the best MDM solutions empower ordinary business users with easy-to-use tools to put master data to work to address common business problems.

Here's a typical example, using MDM in a business-to-business (B2B) sales environment. To best do their jobs, sales and channel personnel need comprehensive, accurate information on customer accounts, contacts, corporate hierarchies, channel partners, products, and more. Yet even small discrepancies in spelling a customer's name (using myself as an example, I use Jacqueline for my billing information and Jakki for my shipping information--talk about a customer information management nightmare) can cause major problems. And many times, customer-facing personnel have no reliable view of product penetration, partner conflicts or gaps, or sales potential. The result is missed opportunity and lost revenue.

Through an intuitive interface, MDM lets users sort, filter, drill down and reconcile discrepancies that exist between similar data in different systems. From a hodgepodge of contradictory, inaccurate data, business users can point and click to generate the single, reliable view they need, without IT assistance.

The next time your CEO or any business person asks what can be done to improve data value and usability, don't let the conversation end as soon as you mention MDM. Explain to the user how MDM can put them in control of enterprise data, and point them to an executive brief that outlines the business usage of MDM in practical, step-by-step fashion, with how-to illustrations.