MDM proposition is for Business leaders not IT Department

In market like India, the biggest challenge for selling a product like MDM is the fact that the software is sold to IT department of a company rather than business leaders. The discussion to buy a piece of software or not has still not gone to the Board of Directors or Business leader chambers. The MDM story is approached from typically by fixing the Data Quality issues and ends up becoming a Data Warehousing project along with Analytics losing its advocacy midway somewhere. This is because the customer and their IT department can see the value immediately. However the long term vision of creating a operational hub where the single version of truth can exist is something that can be envisaged as a business need rather than a technology requirement.

Companies need to have business leaders who can vision the roadmap of MDM. Currently the Growth markets customers are trying to solve their day to day problem and the IT Department of various companies are working towards that. When an MDM value proposition is given to the IT department it always gets into make vs buy discussion which becomes an ugly one. The problem needs to be approached as a roadmap where the long term vision needs to be clear. Hopefully these changes soon in countries like India where IT becomes more business driven along with the technology driven as they need to be hand in hand for success. This would lead to more successful stories of MDM in growth market countries like India.

UID has woken up India to MDM

Couple of years back MDM solutions was not even heard in India. Even though MDM had arrived in various other parts of the world including countries like China and Philippines, India had still not woken to that. Any customer that you would go in India like banks and government sectors, it was difficult to make them understand the concept of MDM. Even if they understood there were questions and concerns around basic infrastructure to support that and a big dilemma on the quality of their data. Data Quality is a big throttle to the MDM.

But the story is a little different now. MDM solution was started being conceptualized in various sectors in India with UID. It had become simple to explain MDM to customers if you would just say UID. The statement 'It would give the Unique Identification to each and every customer that you have" rang a bell. It was even easier to explain to my father as to what is the product that I work on. :-)

There is a very interesting video on You Tube also on MDM which is my personal favorite. Do have a look at that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC17e0HAQg8&feature=related

The IOD event in Las Vegas will showcase some of the interesting use cases of MDM with respect to Retail, Telco and Government sector. All what you wanted to know about IBM MDM will be there at IOD.


http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/2011-conference/im-forum.html

Make verses Buy

Think of a situation where there is a desperate need and desire to eat a chocolate cake. Now in order to make it you would need flour, egg, coco powder, some essence, baking powder, eggs and in case the person is vegetarian then lots of cream. So you would either go to the market buy all these items and then make it at home. The other option is order the same and you might get it in half the time and effort. Definitely if you are not an experienced baker you would choose the second option.

The same debate happened in my last customer visit. The customer thinks that they have a solution which is some what similar to MDM and if they enhance it further they can make it a complete MDM solution. However what they fail to understand is MDM is not a software installation but a journey. It is not only to give to that single customer view but taking that view to the next step which helps them making further decisions on long term future and goals. However one can still go ahead and build an MDM solution if the company understands its own requirement around MDM. If it has experts who have knowledge on this domain and can build this solution. If they do not then it is better to ask the ‘experts’ and their solution rather than start building it else that would lead to failure.

The other reason could be when the company is caught in such dilemmas is when they do not have the long term goal set. Unfortunately a lot of companies especially in growth market still do not understand this because probably they look at short term benefits and probably miss the bigger picture.

Moral of the story, build if you know what you want else get the experts.

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.