Do you need a plan for Master Data Management (MDM)?
Is MDM just a new buzz word in the Business Intelligence community, or is it a valuable discipline which will deliver better business results more efficiently?
No, it’s not just a buzz word – it really is the way forward for companies straining under the weight of more data than they know what to do with, data coming from disparate systems and with inconsistencies that make understanding their business or their customers neigh-on impossible.
Consider this: You’re the CEO of a company with multiple product lines. Through the years you have developed (or inherited) multiple billing systems, multiple customer contact systems and now new on-line systems are complicating things further. You offer your loyal customers increasing discounts when they take multiple product lines. The only problem with this great marketing idea is how to implement and manage it.
With Master Data Management – you would be able to manage a single version of the truth about your customer without having to implement a single view of customer, mega expensive, billing system. Your data can stay in the different billing systems and each day the right data elements are brought together to enable a business process to check the right discounts are being applied to each customer. This protects the business from revenue leakage if your customer disconnects a product; it provides a better customer experience for your customer who now receives the correct discount; it provides a more efficient and cheaper solution to your company and a more modular approach to adding and deleting products which accrue the discount.
All this can be achieved with Master Data Management applied as a well thought-through business strategy and managed in conjunction with your data quality and data governance standards. William McKinght leads the world on Master Data Management approaches. He will be running a course for Altis Consulting in July. Want to learn more about this new way of thinking? Then join us in July for William McKnight’s Master Data Management Course.