Master Data Management – A Lifelong Journey!
Master Data Management (MDM) helps in managing your product or customer master more effectively and efficiently. MDM ensures data consistency across various disparate systems used in any enterprise. This is not a one-time process but a continuous journey. MDM acts as hub of your product or customer master and all other front-end applications subscribe to this hub. This hub acts as a middleware application for all front- end applications.
Let us start our journey of implementing Master Data Management:
The First Step: The companies implementing MDM for the first time will focus on migrating data from different sources to the MDM hub and have a single source of truth that is consistent across the organization. Even building this may take years for large organizations and organizations with huge master data spread across many systems. After migrating the data, the data needs to be cleansed and enriched with information from different systems– this itself will take a long time.
And the journey continues…
• Once you build the Master after years of effort, it will give more tangible benefits to your organization by giving the right data to the right subscriber across the information supply chain. But this is not the end. In today’s scenario, companies deal with stakeholders continuously and hence data flows in out of the system continuously.
Thus, Master Data Management is not a one-time exercise but a lifelong journey! But this journey aids your business by improving the scope for up-selling and cross-selling.
And the journey continues…
• Once you build the Master after years of effort, it will give more tangible benefits to your organization by giving the right data to the right subscriber across the information supply chain. But this is not the end. In today’s scenario, companies deal with stakeholders continuously and hence data flows in out of the system continuously.
- Another pain area is tracking the updates that are not done through the MDM system. For example, a team may discuss and finalize changes to the master data through e-mails or with some documents which may not be updated in the MDM system – this creates a gap in single source of truth. Conscious effort should be made to capture such data and update the system.
- For some of the subscribing applications, there may be real-time two-way integration with PIM. In this case, there is a need for continuously cleansing incoming data. To aid companies in real-time integration, real-time data governing tools are available that ensures master data completeness and validity before loading the new data onto the MDM system.
- Whenever a new partner or customer is added, naturally your Master Data needs to be updated. At times, you may end up with one more subscribing interface.
Thus, Master Data Management is not a one-time exercise but a lifelong journey! But this journey aids your business by improving the scope for up-selling and cross-selling.
Comments
Krithi, a good post on the MDM journey.
But, how do we measure the success of the same? Are we still stuck with the same way we got stuck with measuring the benfits of CRM when it was in place?
It would be very interesting to see if you have any examples on how MDM has helped customers realize the potential.
In my blogs on the evolution of MDM and the sustenance of MDM, I ranted on the future of MDM and now after reading this I wonder if, measuring CRM+MDM together would make sense? Can we make use of social monitoring tools to track our ROI as TCO anyway is an internal measurement?
Posted by: venkataraman.r | September 24, 2009 2:01 PM