Implemented correctly, MDM technology can deliver reliable data to empower organizations to streamline business processes, increase revenue with cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, optimize channel operations, and improve decision making. In short it can increase speed and agility in both business and IT. But few CEO’s are fully aware of what MDM’s potential on business. This seminar is targeted at organizations that are considering or actively investigating MDM projects, specifically preparing both IT organizations and business leadership with the understanding they to successfully kick-start these programs.

In today’s high dynamic and competitive environment organization the business stakes are high. And so too is the price of failure. Enterprise across all industry sectors increasingly recognize the importance of driving internal efficiencies, improve agility and performance and remain competitive. To do so they need to run their most critical business applications and make important business decisions based on trusted set of accurate, consistent and timely data. As a result there is increased awareness and interest in the role that data management disciplines like data quality and master data management (MDM) play plays in establishing trusted enterprise-wide data by creating a clean, consistent and single view of customers, products and other business entities. But ensuring that your business applications and processes are running off a shared, trusted set of data is more than just about implementing an alphabet soup of technologies, including MDM. Getting the organizational infrastructure right, in terms of culture, people and process, is perhaps more critical to achieve tangible, measurable and long term business results and success. Hence any MDM initiative should be driven by a strong and compelling business case that is operationally reinforced through a well-disciplined data governance strategy.

Having a rock-solid business case forms is especially important when selling an IT initiative to your organization; more so when it is technically complex like MDM. It requires both IT and business units to collaborate and cooperate closely, in ways perhaps not done before over an IT project and to harmonize, cleanse and protect and share information across the enterprise. And framing MDM in the context of data governance delivers an important operational framework for delivering reliable and usable master data to business applications. It provides the necessary processes and policies to define data stewardship workflows and controls. Without such effective processes and institutionalized controls in place even the most technically elegantly designed MDM system can be derailed and quickly become a headless IT/business initiative over time. Hence data governance forms a key second part of the MDM puzzle; while MDM tools ensure that master data is kept in order, data governance define roles and policies in the organization ensure that they remain in order as part of a sustainable business initiative.

Implementing MDM might be challenging and achieving success is clearly a tall order. But that shouldn’t deter organizations. The benefits of MDM are well worth the effort. Indeed many organizations consider high quality master data as a key strategy for accomplishing corporate objectives and meeting increasingly demanding and complex regulations. Harmonizing master data on an enterprise-wide basis has already paid high dividends for many early adopters. Proper management of master data has proven extremely effective in increasing the visibility into business operations, optimizing business processes and enhancing decision making. That makes it a highly worthwhile business endeavor for organizations.