Enterprises are increasingly investing in MDM solutions to leverage the clear competitive advantage that well-curated data offers.
Impactful developers traditionally enjoy the freedom to create internal applications and APIs without too much interference from enterprise data architecture and other departments such as marketing or finance.
Under the old model, business unit leaders would initiate development projects that only touched their core needs and information. This is changing.
Now developers have to respond to requests that reach across the enterprise. They have to worry about integrating customer relationship data from finance, marketing, customer service, and sales while thinking about data science and analytics. At the same time, enterprises want to increase business agility. Developers need to rethink their processes in order to meet these new demands.
Development teams must now work with a variety of tools and systems that are outside of their direct control. Customer, vendor, and supply chain datasets are spread out across multiple databases, and it falls on developers to identify and manage the technical debt that these applications and databases have.
Even Simple Projects Need Master Data Management
Let’s imagine a company who has a basic e-commerce mobile app. It allows users to select from a handful of products, create an account, and submit their credit card details for payment.
In theory, you can narrowly focus your development team on activities that you completely control :
- Building the backend services to support your mobile app.
- Managing several databases and tables to power the application.
- Designing your mobile UI.
- Integrating the application with a payment engine.
But in practice, the situation is far more complex. Your application is not the only one querying customer and product data, or updating that data.
The marketing department has its own set of SaaS tools for interacting with customers and generating leads. Your finance department uses its own data lake for forecasting. Your fulfillment team uses its own tools to organize and ship out orders.
Updating and curating all of this data is a painstaking manual process. As a result, it’s something that enterprises typically don’t do very often. Data lives in these silos.
Understanding who your customer is across multiple channels such as mobile, web, and in person is table stakes for all companies now. When a customer provides a new shipping address in the mobile app, they expect that the shipping department gets it, and that customer service has it in case they have an issue.
Even if you are able to consolidate this information into a single data warehouse, it isn’t designed for the responsiveness and speed of today’s mobile and apps.
But we’re all operating in an increasingly connected, personalized marketplace. Inaccurate, slow, or outdated data means losing revenue-generating opportunities and frustrating customers.
With Increasing Complexity, Master Data Management Becomes a Strategic Asset
Master data management allows enterprises to consolidate multiple sources quickly and curate customer profile attributes. These are useful benefits for organizations of any size, but they are important strategic advantages for large enterprises.
As the enterprise grows, customers will interact with its products across multiple stores, applications, and other channels. The ability to personalize the customer experience across multiple channels requires a single point of reference for all customer data.
Every product or customer data update is also an opportunity to connect with customers.. Enterprises that know which customers to inform and what channels to use will have far better results than those that don’t.
This becomes even more pronounced for enterprises that grow through acquisition. Streamlining data infrastructure and integrations from newly acquired organizations is a complex and expensive problem that master data consolidation helps solve.
Finally, strict regulations like GDPR present additional demands on the way enterprises handle and use customer data. Large, complex organizations must adhere to the same compliance requirements as small, lean ones – but have much more to lose in terms of absolute value.
The Heart of the Problem Between Data and Communication
Developers like to think in terms of technical problems and solutions. To the developer’s mind, it’s easy to say that data sharing and communication issues are the result of choosing the wrong underlying technology.
It’s tempting to believe that perhaps your problems would go away if you switch to a relational database management system (RDBMS), or a NoSQL system, or something else. But these technologies are not a panacea.
The solutions to these problems have to involve people, processes, and technology altogether – you can’t get there just by changing one system for another. You are still left with the web of disconnected data that can’t be accessed in the timeframe needed to make a real impact with your customers.
Master data management plays a critical role in this environment because it establishes a single point of reference for people, processes, and technology to draw data from. Without this critical infrastructure in place, there’s no guarantee that developers, database experts, and other team members will be working with the same information.
Start Asking the Right Questions About Data
As an enterprise developer, the rush to deliver, integrate, and deploy application code almost always takes precedence over the slow, deliberative process of the data lifecycle. But the features of the data lifecycle correspond exactly with the questions that developers need to ask:
- Where will the data come from?
- How will the application access the data?
- How and where will we store it?
- How should we update and maintain legacy databases while building for new use cases?
- What types of data will we have? How quickly will this change over time?
- How will we query from it? What are the most common queries users will run?
- How will we manage and scale the data?
- How will we protect the data from data loss, disaster, and corruption?
- How will we secure the data?
- How will we maintain the performance needed for our applications now and in the future?
If these questions remain unanswered, enterprise development teams fail to deliver value to end-users. Instead, the application team hands over a design and says, “Here it is. Now build a data integration architecture that can support what we made.”
No technology can answer these questions. But there are technologies that will improve your processes and make communication with team members and stakeholders easier.
Master data management is one of the missing links that helps put developers, enterprise stakeholders, and end-users on the same page. Access to accurate, continuously updated data enables a freer, more collaborative exchange of ideas, goals, and processes between development teams and their partners.
Reltio is a Master Data Management vendor that gives enterprises the ability to consolidate their data and eliminate data silos. Find out more about how Reltio works today.
Learn More with the Reltio Community
The Reltio Community is a great place to learn more about how to use the Reltio products and connect with Master Data Management peers. Rely on the expertise of Reltio partners, customers, and technical experts.