This chapter concludes our book. The journey through MDM is a constantly learning, churning, and maturing experience. Hopefully, we have contributed with enough insight to make your job easier.
A Customer MDM program cannot be taken lightly. It is not another IT or business only project. It starts with a strong executive buy-in that can truly mobilize the many needed resources and sponsor the sure-to-be required radical changes.
The pervasive nature of Customer MDM can potentially impact everyone in the company. It has been repeated over and over that MDM is about people, process, and technology, but it also simply boils down to enabling the ability to take good care of your data by creating a quality culture through cross-functional collaboration. Customer MDM spreads both vertically and horizontally across the organization. It is its ubiquitous nature that makes Customer MDM a powerful capability to have. Its holistic set of techniques and approaches span business-specific orientation, and therefore enable more enterprise-wide practices and governance.
And finally, it is important to not lose sight of the business case for the MDM solution. After all, it is about solving a business problem and aligning data management practices with better decision making and improved strategic planning. Data integrity and fitness is a critical component for accurate business assessment.
Achieving true Customer MDM is:
- To properly establish data ownership, governance, and stewardship practices that effectively enable and focus data management practices to create true company-wide cohesion.
- To aptly integrate customer information from disparate sources and effectively employ data quality techniques to reach a 360° view of the customer.
- To suitably create a more integrated and optimized relationship between the operational and the analytical functions to maximize competitive advantage.
Due diligence will pay off, but it can be a long and bumpy journey. Fasten your seatbelts!