Master Data Management in Practice: Achieving True Customer MDM

Technology's Influence on MDM

Although many who have written about MDM, including ourselves, have emphasized that MDM is not just about technology, we do recognize that there is continual opportunity for MDM-focused technology to significantly influence MDM implementations and practices.

This is especially true with Customer MDM because much of its data, context, and governance are largely associated with industry-common standards, rules, logic, definition, and reference data—all of which are conducive to business process automation opportunities. These opportunities will drive continued development of technology that improves MDM value and effectiveness in the following ways:

• More integration of MDM components at the platform level
• More independent plug-and-play type product offerings that can deliver more modularized functionality as needed within an existing MDM environment
• More open source code and configurability options to better adapt solutions to existing platforms or multi-vendor environments

MDM customers essentially need all the above for their MDM implementations to continue to mature and ROI to more rapidly occur. Most technology-driven markets hit a wall due to product saturation and/or diminishing value and demand. There is still a large market for good MDM technology, but the value and demand for this will be determined by factors such as these:

• Ability to accelerate MDM ROI
• A company's ability to overcome internal constraints to better leverage technology and ...