Johannesburg, 11 Dec 2013
Master data management (MDM) is emerging as a key technology for 2014 since it is pivotal to melding current trends: big data, social media and cloud, with the need for governance by combining practices, processes, policies, standards and software tools.
However, complicating matters is the emergence of multi-domain MDM. MDM operates across different business domains - product and customer being the two most visible culprits - but as MDM has matured, so more focus has followed in the tools vendors have brought to market, each with, among other benefits, a set of templates that speed up deployment. Today, you can get MDM for customer acquisition, assets, locations, or MDM by industry, tailored to meet the unique needs of financial or healthcare organisations, says Johann van der Walt, MDM practice manager at Knowledge Integration Dynamics.
Choice often results in problems and the problem here is that in many cases, there are now multiple MDM domains in single organisations. The problem with that is that MDM is supposed to offer one single, reliable version of the truth, offer a roadmap to single records of information that don't get propagated between databases or stores, and ensure business people are always dealing with the sacred artefact.
As long as you buy your MDM software from the same vendor, you should be fine, because the two systems will talk to one another without any hassle. The problem with that, however, is that in reality no vendor has truly enterprise-wide, multi-domain MDM capabilities. In some cases, customers need to acquire packages from different vendors. In other cases, the vendors have snapped up their counterparts to plug the holes themselves. Since that's not yet widespread and is in its infancy, it is unreliable and risky for businesses to throw in their lot and take the word of their vendor that the systems will, in fact, communicate sans glitch. They could end up taking it on the chin instead.
Trends such as big data and cloud only heap pressure on an already tension-fuelled environment because big data, of which social media forms a large and untamed component, must be organised and slotted into the processes, policies, standards and practices if it is to regurgitate any benefit whatsoever.
The cloud offers up another tricky situation to encumber the difficult discussions currently taking place across large businesses. Most of them have decided that cloud will have to wait for all but point operations or specific lines of business, because it erodes policy enforcement, standards, practices and governance and nobody has come up with a satisfactory means for effectively mitigating the risk that entails to core data.
Those general considerations also factor into the thinking that specific industries will apply to these trends and MDM, such as financial services, telecommunications and retail, particularly here in South Africa.
However, uptake of big data and cloud solutions, arguably the two biggest trends shaping business abroad, is slow in South Africa. There are numerous reasons behind the situation, such as low broadband penetration, lack of C-level understanding of how these can be beneficial, traditional views of IT as a cost centre and so on, but South African organisations have typically demonstrated technological and business savvy by rapidly grasping trends beyond their infancy.
While big data and cloud have yet to have a seismic effect on the local market, multi-domain MDM, specifically in private cloud or on-premises situations, will increasingly demand greater executive attention, particularly in more competitive sectors of the market.
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