Master Data Management and the Mid-Market Need

Bob Bloom, President of Business Development Solutions, recently got back from the MDM Summit Fall 2008 in New York.  MDM stands for Master Data Management. 

While our company primarily focuses on working with mid-market companies, the conference was mostly focused on larger organizations.  Still, Bob wanted to attend in order to see what was going on in the MDM world for larger enterprises and see how these practices can be applied to mid-market organizations.

One of the initial impressions that I got from Bob regarding the MDM Summit is that mid-market companies have the same basic drivers for master data management applications as larger enterprises:

1. Analytics – The ability to query across multiple databases and properly count the multiple representations of the same organization and contacts that are in separate data silos.  Large and mid-market companies have the same issues getting a handle on questions such as  “How much business are we doing with XYZ?”.
2. Single Customer View – The need for representatives to see all the authorized information about an account across multiple systems in order to market, sell, and service customers better.
3. Corporate Hierarchies – The need to gain further “share of wallet” with an account by working the corporate family tree in order to up-sell and cross-sell.
4. Data Quality – Identify and resolve various data quality issues such as incomplete data and duplicate records.
5. Mergers and Acquisitions – Understanding the unique and overlap after acquiring a new business and properly incorporating the legacy data into the exiting or brand new system, including organizing corporate hierarchies. 
6. Data Consolidation and Building New Systems  - Similar to mergers and acquisitions, when an organization adopts a brand new database system, such as a CRM system, many times the data is coming from multiple files and needs to be matched, linked, and organized for the new system.
7. Government Regulations – Many organizations have certain data management issues in order to comply with government regulations.

The big differences between the mid-market and larger enterprises are the scale of the project, the time frame to implement, and the cost of the implementation.