Although many who have written about MDM, including ourselves, have emphasized that MDM is not just about technology, we do recognize that there is continual opportunity for MDM-focused technology to significantly influence MDM implementations and practices.
This is especially true with Customer MDM because much of its data, context, and governance are largely associated with industry-common standards, rules, logic, definition, and reference data—all of which are conducive to business process automation opportunities. These opportunities will drive continued development of technology that improves MDM value and effectiveness in the following ways:
- More integration of MDM components at the platform level
- More independent plug-and-play type product offerings that can deliver more modularized functionality as needed within an existing MDM environment
- More open source code and configurability options to better adapt solutions to existing platforms or multi-vendor environments
MDM customers essentially need all the above for their MDM implementations to continue to mature and ROI to more rapidly occur. Most technology-driven markets hit a wall due to product saturation and/or diminishing value and demand. There is still a large market for good MDM technology, but the value and demand for this will be determined by factors such as these:
- Ability to accelerate MDM ROI
- A company's ability to overcome internal constraints to better leverage technology and their internal resource pool
- Multi-data domain MDM growth and the ability for technology to provide extensible and scalable solutions that minimize cost and redundancy
The technology spectrum for MDM is very wide. In fundamental terms, MDM requires data storage, data collection and distribution, data presentation, data integration, business process work-flow implementation and orchestration, data quality, metadata management, hierarchy management, metrics, and reporting. This is in addition to foundational corporate technologies, which help organizations communicate better, provide more effective training, and better disseminate information internally and externally.
Adding to the mix is the fact that most companies are not starting from scratch when it comes to establishing their overall MDM technological solution. They likely have existing storage systems, distributed infrastructure, and/or applications they want to leverage and integrate. It becomes a technological challenge to evaluate all pieces and decide on the best combination.
Understanding new technological trends alone can be overwhelming. Phil Simon collaborated with a team of experts in many technological fields and compiled an outstanding book that offers great insight into the latest trends, such as cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA), open source, mobile computing, social networking, and more.1 We highly recommend his book to increase awareness on technological trends. Not that everything shared will have a direct impact on your MDM implementation, but with the pervasive nature of MDM, it is important to stay aware of the many possibilities.
Some open source MDM solutions are slowly emerging, but they are still lagging behind leading MDM products in both functionality and capability. Most notable open source solutions include the Mural community started by Sun Microsystems, Inc.—acquired by Oracle Corp.—and Talend open MDM community. Neither one has had any significant commercial success to date.
One of the big challenges regarding technology for MDM is related to its wide range of applicability and use. Some tools are used by IT, some by the business, and others by both. Creating powerful tools that are easy enough for business users to utilize can be quite an ordeal. On the other hand, IT users may be able to understand the concepts behind complex tools more easily, but don't quite know how to best apply them to solve a business issue. Because MDM and data governance are primarily business-driven efforts that need to be supported by well-positioned data stewards, there is still quite a bit of room for technology to evolve in the coming years in support of MDM practices and to better enable and optimize the data steward roles.