With the New Year dawning I wanted to look back at some industry trends from the past twelve months, and then look at ahead at what we’re likely to see in 2010. So, this week: recap. Next week: predictions.
“Multidomain MDM” Goes Mainstream
From its inception MDM was meant to be “multidomain” – a solution for multiple data types. This stood in contrast to CDI or PIM, each of which focuses on a single domain. But with CDI morphing into “MDM for Customer Data” and PIM to “MDM for Product Data,” the terminology got a bit muddled. Hence the somewhat redundant “multidomain MDM” came into common usage in 2009 to differentiate it from single-domain MDM. As we saw with the Gartner numbers that I reviewed in my last post, the obvious benefits of managing all domains via a single platform, easier maintenance, and the advantages of leveraging existing investments, are spurring increased adoption. Still, confusion remained over multidomain MDM in the last year, not just with terminology, but also with capabilities. I addressed this in a late November post, but to reiterate: It’s not just about the data model, a true multidomain MDM hub has to be able to model, cleanse, match and relate.
Proactive Data Governance Takes Root
Many IT decision-makers came to the realization in 2009 that reactive data governance is bad because it is not responsive to real-time business needs. Business users increasingly demanded real-time data availability and data stewards worked to put proactive data governance into place to meet these demands. My friend Dan Power covered this topic earlier this year, showing that authoring data directly in an MDM hub enables firms to decouple data entry from traditional CRM and ERP systems, and establish the hub as both the System of Entry and the System of Record.
Taking Aim At The Reference Data Problem
Early on in 2009 we started seeing a lot of customer activity around the “reference data problem” and that interest remained strong through the year. To quickly summarize: certain business processes, order-to-cash for instance, oftentimes use three or more different systems interacting with each other to complete the loop. If their “look-up code” data isn’t standardized (one uses “USA” the second “U.S.” the third “United States”) problems ensue. As a category, reference data is similar to, though distinct from, master data. Yet the similarities are such that effective MDM solutions like the Siperian Hub are perfect for solving the reference data problem. My colleague Manish Sood blogged on this topic in detail here and here.
Be sure to come back next week to see our bold predictions for 2010!
