Nils Pedersen

Communicating the value of MDM to executive leadership can be a challenge. Here are four simple steps to get started.

The return on investment (ROI) of master data management (MDM) is a topic that keeps captivating people – especially those considering investing in MDM. And with good reason. As with all major expenditures, people want to know what the outcome will be before they commit to it. It’s basic business logic.

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t always straightforward, since it isn’t necessarily easy to quantify the value of high-quality data and smoother data-driven business processes.

With this in mind, here are a few helpful steps to help you determine the ROI of a master data management implementation.

In the internet’s infancy, before search engines and browsers, you had to know exactly where to look to find the information you wanted.

With the emergence of search engines, the entire wealth of information became available at our fingertips just by inserting a keyword. Google’s most significant achievement involved making sense of big data served up from over a billion websites globally according to user preferences, location and history. Google simply and elegantly integrated the world wide web to deliver information with speed and relevance for the user.

In my previous blog post I explained master data management (MDM) and its importance in the context of the consumer and the customer experience. In this post, I look ahead and shed some light on what we can expect from a technology and customer experience perspective in the near future, as the growing expectations from consumers are currently driving businesses in new directions - and with that, they are also driving MDM.

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by TAG’s (Technology Association of Georgia) Julie Bryant Fisher. As someone who works in the master data management industry, it was an interesting and eye-opening reminder for me. It made me realize that most people not working directly with data management, data governance, ecommerce systems, etc., often do not know exactly what master data management (MDM) is – or even what master data is – much less what a significant impact it has on the average consumer.

With this in mind, I want to take this opportunity to explain MDM from a consumer perspective.

For any business initiative to be a success, it’s important that initial preparations and considerations are in place. That, of course, also applies to your master data management implementation. These are the initial steps you as a business should focus on to create the foundation for a successful master data management journey.

Your organization, and organizations of any size, depends on the accuracy of its data to gain financial insights and improve marketing, sales and customer service. In fact, pretty much every department within your company will rely on data in some way. 

And if that data is inaccurate, hard to access or only tells part of the story, it can severely hamper operations across the business. Data errors can seriously impact relationships with customers, suppliers and business partners and result in significant financial loss.

Application data management (ADM) is gaining popularity as the number of applications increases

If, like me, you have worked in the technology industry for many years, you’ve likely heard more times than you can remember that islands of information are major obstacles to business productivity. Siloed data is to be avoided like LA traffic and convenience store sushi; and “sharing is caring,” especially when it comes to empowering enterprise-wide processes and workflows.