Mastering Data Management

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MDM-Powered Solutions can translate your vision into benefits

Master Data is the high-value, core information used to support critical business processes across the enterprise.  It drives every business transaction, application, report and decision. Mastering your data with a master data management solution can be a strategic differentiator, and open the door to MDM-Powered Solutions. MDM-Powered Solutions can leverage new insights and business processes that result from mastering your data and enable greater confidence within existing applications and business processes.

Before you start, though, how do you build the case for MDM within your organization? From our experience, the business drivers tend to fall into three categories: revenue growth, efficiency and regulatory compliance / risk management.

Our colleague Larry Dubov covered these drivers in great detail in his recent series, Building a Business Case for MDM.

But what happens when you’ve talked about these drivers – but you still haven’t made the case to the powers that be?

Vision

But even with all the right business drivers accounted for, you still need vision to really execute MDM.  Without vision and (and a series of incremental steps towards that vision), you’ll never get beyond the Powerpoint stage.

Before you can even start to discuss the idea of MDM value, it’s critical to articulate your organization’s vision.  Starting small to gain momentum will create support for that long-term goal.

At IBM we are working to help organizations do just that.

Why is this so important? Quite simply, the vision may not be understood by everyone in your organization. Usually the MDM vision is established when some sort of ‘intellectual connection’ is drawn from MDM’s capabilities and how they align to some critical strategic need in the company.

For some organizations, it's a shift from account-centric systems to a customer -centric systems. For others, it's a focus on key B2B customers who are the growth engine for a customer.

An enterprise’s vision can be as simple as ‘a distinct purpose or direction for the business’ and the mission can be how you intend to execute. The MDM vision becomes a more focused statement that integrates with the organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

You have to decide: what’s most important to your organization? Being customer-centric? Improving brand quality? How you answer the question will help determine your vision.

As Gartner notes, “Ensure that you have a good understanding of the organization's vision, mission and value propositions before trying to craft an MDM vision and strategy that enables them.”  This will insure MDM is not an "IT initiative," but one that can support the overall business.

Once you’ve begun to answer the vision conundrum, you can move into the actual execution of MDM, and, most excitingly, the realm of MDM-Powered Solutions. MDM can be used to both enhance existing applications and to enable new applications that could not be developed before MDM data (or trusted master data) was available.

Data enhanced by MDM can be integrated into existing applications, via plug-ins or data services, or deployed as a new horizontal or vertical application that augments existing applications.

Plus, MDM-Powered Solutions can help deliver ROI by leveraging your existing data and applications. Executives love this.

Join us at IBM Information on Demand (#IODGC) in Las Vegas as we discuss the future of MDM-Powered Solutions. We’re hosting several hands-on lab sessions where you can see demos, practice building new MDM-Powered Solutions and talk to IBM experts. This is also your chance to give us feedback on usability and ask questions about improving your existing apps.

Join us for session 3164A on Tuesday, October 26 from 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM in Lagoon 1 of the Mandalay Bay South Convention Center. You can also attend our drop-in usability lab sessions 3367A-3367J throughout the conference. Consult the SmartSite or your agenda for full details.