Whats in store at IBM Software Universe

One of the easiest and the best way to reach to the customer is to invite all of them to an event and make them know about the product. At the same time ask their first hand feedback about the products they are working with. This is what Software Universe Event is all about.

The IBM Software Universe Event, 7th one in the last 7 years has Customers, SMEs, Sales and Marketing forum coming under one Umbrella in Mumbai. Some of the very exciting topics that would be covered around Information Management are Information and Analytics, Big Data and Streams. All what you wanted to know about how IBM is investing in Big data would be shown in the SWU Expo.

Big Data is the latest buzz in the Information management space. One of the major areas where Big Data can be used is how the Enterprise Information can be extended beyond the External Public Platform.

A simple Use case could be around a retail chain who has a multi-domain MDM solution in an Enterprise view. But at the same the Retail Chain also wants to know what a specific customer is talking about his products in the Social media. The Size of the Social Media Information that needs to be tabbed for this purpose would be huge and along with that it needs to be combined with live streams. All this can be combined in single view of the Customer and can give him the holistic view of the Customer in an Enterprise. And many more use cases that are there.

So do not miss the event to know more about IBM products.
Here is the link where you can register for this event for 2011:

https://www-07.ibm.com/events/in/softwareuniverse/register1.html

What type of data is master data?

Recently while doing a demo to one of the customer, one of the question that kept on hovering around most part of the discussion is "I have this attribute. Can I keep it in the Master Data Management Solution". The attributes that were chosen were price of a product, points earned by the customer and so forth.

The price of the product for that customer is something that would change multiple times in a single day and a similar thing could happen with the Point system. This definitely does not contribute to the Master data.

A lot of times it has been observed that customer does not clearly understand what Master Data is and often confuses it with a repository which can hold all their data like a Data Warehouse vis-à-vis a solution which could give them that single view of the customer or any entity. So it is very important to make the customer understand what Master Data is. The attributes that form a part of Master Data should not be highly transactional as then the objective of the MDM is lost.

Looking for views from other MDM Specialists.

One of the biggest marketing event by IBM in the month of October.

http://www.youtube.com/user/IBMSoftwareIndia


Register at the following link

https://www-07.ibm.com/events/in/softwareuniverse/register1.html

Learning Initiate

Recently went through an IBM Initiate training, and I was very impressed with the set of tools and documentation of the product. It has a very cool workbench which gives the capability to configure and maintain the product. This tool can handle all the nuisances of the creation of an MDM server solution. Most of the MDM server projects actually do not reach their achieved goal or are failures because the process to achieve Master view itself fails. Typically the steps involve around loading cleansing, analyzing, and reviewing the data.

The Initiate workbench provides capabilities to do all this and more. The most interesting feature that it provides what it says is algorithm configuration which typically allows you to:-
1. Standardize the data to a format which can be entered into the system
2. Bucket the candidates
3. Compare the members

Configuring Algorithm is also pretty cool through a drag and drop UI. With a clear set of use cases it should take probably a day to configure it . Once you have configured all this, then the data is loaded into the system, and there on you start doing the actual MDM functionalities of matching and linking records.

I still need to see the other UI, which is Inspector and their reporting capabilities but till now what I have seen is quite impressive.

Householding in Telco

Recently I have been looking at MDM Server fitment into a Telco domain. There is lot of scope in the Telco to make it and it is a very heterogeneous vertical. However, the use cases that you would like to demonstrate in a MDM Product which gives you very customer specific view of the story is probably similar.

What could those use cases be and I am adding a few:-
1. Creating a Party
2. Creating a Product
3. Suspect duplicate processing
4. Creating a contract between Party and a Telco product
5. Householding information
6. Establishing Value proposition of a customer
7. Campaign management

Among all the use cases above and I am sure there are quite a few more, householding information is one of the basic concept on which the customer view can give the biggest advantage to any Telco customer. The householding will give the value proposition also to the customer. However the way we define a household may differ in different industry. So in other ways the way we define a householding would be a set of rules using which we can group people together.

There is a very interesting article on the following site about householding that is very informational.

http://www.information-management.com/news/1010001-1.html?pg=2

Delhi Airport Wow !!

Sitting at the Delhi International airport, I was completely overwhelmed by the size and the standards that the airport had now. It had Terminals for domestic and international flights along with secured wireless connections. The immense size of the airport with most interesting places to shop and eat made my 5 hours wait at the airport almost unnoticeable. From Swaroski to Haldiram and Mc Donalds to Nirula’s , it had the right mix of the east meets the west kind of image. The standards were as good as any world class airports. :-)

But what completely took me by surprise was the big banner that I saw on terminal 3 which said “Smarter transportation for a smarter planet” and the known logo of IBM. The managed network infrastructure solution on terminal 3 was done by IBM in partnership with IBM International Airport. All the things that we have been working upon through IBM’s smarter planet initiative and to see them implemented while we actually reap its benefit (while I write this blog) was great.

Last week, I went to buy camera as our last one had become completely useless. I was interested in buying Sony but I was bowled by the options available. Come to it I had just come to buy a plain camera which could take some decent pictures, but then you had this root product of camera which had almost 20 variants like Series H, S,T etc and each of them had further sub variants. And then for each variant there are separate terms and condition which could override the root terms and condition like the warranty period, guarantee periods etc.

Similarly, there was this concept of bundling wherein if I bought the Sony LED 49 inches, I would get a Sony camera free. Well that was little too much to go for but then I realized how complicated the product structures can be.

At the back of my mind I was trying to map this to MDM Server Product domain capabilities. Can this whole structure be implemented in that solution? And yes we could. MDM Server structure capabilities allow saving variants of the products as well as supports complex relationships and bundles.

So finally going back to what I bought. Well still thinking. Hopefully I would be able to close on that soon.