30 MDM Customer Use Cases (Master Data Management in action)
Jakki Geiger writes:
Master Data Management (MDM) has been used by companies for more than eight years to address the challenge of fragmented and inconsistent data across systems. Over the years we’ve compiled quite a cadre of uses cases across industries and strategic initiatives. I thought this outline of the 30 most common MDM initiatives may be of interest to those of you who are just getting started on your MDM journey.
Although these organizations span different industries, face varied business problems and started with diverse domains, you’ll notice that revenue, compliance and operational efficiency are the most common drivers of MDM initiatives. The impetus is to improve the foundational data that’s used for analysis and daily operations. (Click on the chart to make it larger.)
Curious what you make of the “use cases” in the charts?
They are all good goals but I am not sure I would call them “use cases.”
Take HealthCare under Marketing, which reads:
To improve the customer experience and marketing effectiveness with a better understanding of members, their household relationships and plan/policy information.
Is that a use case? For master data management?
The Wikipedia entry on master data management says in part:
At a basic level, MDM seeks to ensure that an organization does not use multiple (potentially inconsistent) versions of the same master data in different parts of its operations, which can occur in large organizations. A common example of poor MDM is the scenario of a bank at which a customer has taken out a mortgage and the bank begins to send mortgage solicitations to that customer, ignoring the fact that the person already has a mortgage account relationship with the bank. This happens because the customer information used by the marketing section within the bank lacks integration with the customer information used by the customer services section of the bank. Thus the two groups remain unaware that an existing customer is also considered a sales lead. The process of record linkage is used to associate different records that correspond to the same entity, in this case the same person.
Other problems include (for example) issues with the quality of data, consistent classification and identification of data, and data-reconciliation issues.
Can you find any “use cases” in the Infomatica post?
BTW, topic maps avoid “inconsistent” data without forcing you to reconcile and update all your data records. (Inquire.)