|
Page 2 of 2
DEPLOYMENT TRENDS EMPHASIZE SOFT SKILLS TO ACHIEVE MDM SUCCESS
Even with all the risks and inhibitors impacting the potential momentum of adoption, MDM continues to emerge as a strategic IT priority for many companies. In fact, 44% of enterprises consider the deployment of a master data management initiative as either a priority or a critical priority in the coming year, on par with other strategic IT initiatives such as the adoption of service-architectures (see Figure 1). The important takeaway from these potentially competing thoughts—increasing MDM priority and daunting inhibitors to MDM—is that there are many ways to skin this MDM cat; customer adoption trends reveal multiple approaches to evolving an MDM strategy. Trends among successful implementations point to building a case for change, investing in people and process, and prioritizing for data quality. advertisement
Setting the foundation for an MDM strategy goes beyond identifying the key business drivers associated with an MDM project. IT supporters of MDM often find themselves in the unique position of identifying poor data quality as the root cause of many business problems before their business counterparts come to the same conclusion. Even when the business users of an ERP, CRM, or BI application recognize that they have bad data, they typically blame IT first, as if the supporting technology has any control over the processes that capture and update this information. Success requires I&KM professionals to:
· Build a business case for MDM using real examples. Identify the most critical business processes that can be improved by MDM and use real examples from your business to demonstrate how poor data quality is currently impacting these processes. For example, to help build the case for a customer master data initiative, ask your direct marketing organization to provide the costs of wasted postage and marketing collateral sent to duplicate, invalid, or undeliverable customer addresses.
· Put on your sales and marketing hat - you're giving a road show. To successfully engage the business stakeholders that should own the definitions, rules, and policies required to implement an MDM solution, speak to them in their own language. In other words, what is the business value of such an investment? How do you build a case from their perspective? What business pain point can you address? Brush up on your PowerPoint skills, create a compelling story, and kick off a brown-bag-lunch speaking tour across key lines of business and functional organizations.
NEXT: The Secrets Of Success
Download the rest of this report, including graphs and notes, free of charge.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.
|
