The intersection of digital technology and heightened consumer expectation has had a colossal impact on nearly every industry. Regardless of what your business does, you are likely under intense pressure to deliver new products, services and growth faster than ever before. From niche competitors and digitally minded upstarts to established monolith competitors, the stakes are constantly being raised. So how do you keep up?
The answer is innovation. Innovating with new product and service offerings, how you reach and serve customers, or even how your business functions internally. But what do we mean when we say innovation? My favorite way to define it goes like this: innovation is the process of combining existing things in a way that creates something entirely new. I like that definition because it’s simple, informative and it de-mystifies the iterative process of innovation. Once you start to think of innovation this way you can apply it easily: Amazon applied the Walmart model—“stack it high, sell it cheap”—to e-commerce. Apple added a multi-touch interface to the internet-connected cell phone. And Uber combined taxis and geo-location to those new smartphones. The list is endless.
If combining previously separate business ideas can leads to innovation, why wouldn’t a similar philosophy hold true when applied to data? Here are 3 simple ways multidomain master data management helps you innovate faster.
Removing the barriers between the data that supports a business’ enterprise has helped many companies better align their organizational and operational data to improve overall process efficiency and cross-departmental collaboration. This is key, since it’s likely not just one department currently managing one type (“domain”) of data is responsible for innovation within your company. Innovation, almost by definition, is collaborative.
A multidomain approach to your master data will help you apply consistent processes to all your critical information; ensuring enterprise level decisions that are based on accurate and up-to-date views that directly support business level objectives. Connecting your data helps ensure everyone has the right information, at the right tim in your internal processes to provide an accurate view of the big picture and ultimately spur faster innovation.
The true value of data often resides at the place where it intersects with other types of information. This is why Gartner predicts that the worldwide market for business analytics and intelligence software will grow to nearly $23 billion dollars by 2020.
But clichés like “garbage in, garbage out” exist for a reason. A multidomain approach to master data helps ensure that the data you’re using to make strategic business decisions, such as data about your products and your customers, is accurate and reliable.
By providing support of your existing business analytics and intelligence processes, multidomain master data management can make it faster and easier to uncover previously unrealized relationships between your data, and identify the most valuable areas of overlap.
The stated goal for many businesses today is to move from their current product-centric models and become truly customer-centric. The holy grail of customer-centricity is the ability to create an entirely unique, 1:1 product variation for each customer according to their preferences and the ability to present it at the most appropriate time in the buying process. For most, if not all, this is not yet a reality. But it is possible to take positive steps in that direction.
Let’s break it down further. At a bare minimum, a personalized offer requires accurate data about the product being sold as well as accurate data about prospective customer to co-exist and be accessible in a way that can easily be operationalized. Further value comes as you add more and more granular data points to the equation, be it information about purchase history, social interaction habits, their location, and many more. These are the layers of data that ultimately need to be combined in the right order to build and present personalized offers, all in service of achieving the “holy grail.” Viewed this way, why would you want to keep your master data in entirely separate business systems?
A key question facing many companies today is, “What do we do next?” Deploying a holistic, multidomain approach to managing your enterprise data today frees your business to focus on the next stages of your business’ innovation. It enables you to create new strategies, capture deeper insights and build new products. Faster than ever before, and all in service of your customer.
So, if innovation is the combination of existing business ideas in new ways, the question then becomes, what business ideas can you create from combining your data in new ways?