Five Steps to Guarantee a Successful Master Data Management Implementation
Today’s guest blog post is written by Nils Erik Pedersen of Stibo Systems. In here Nils Erik goes through five essential prerequisites for making your MDM implementation a success.
For any Master Data Management initiative to be a success, it’s important that initial preparations and considerations are in place. These are the steps you as a business cannot ignore when initiating any type of Master Data Management journey. The success of your initiatives depends on it.
#1. Establish your business vision and define Master Data Management’s role in it
Before you even decide which Master Data Management aspects and processes you need, you must start with focusing on something completely different than your data: Your business. What is your overall business vision? What is it that you specifically need to solve to fulfill that vision? I bet the answers to these questions to begin with won’t come down to “improving our data quality” or “create better workflows around our product on-boarding processes”.
But once you start drilling into your business vision and its components, you’ll probably find that processes around data quality and data workflows do in fact support your greater vision. But it’s a question of translating IT challenges into broader business problems, such as the challenge of creating a frictionless customer journey or how to empower your employees with the insights that they need.
If you view MDM as a business driver – a business problem solver instead of an IT problem solver – you’ll have an easier time getting buy-in from the rest of the business, as well as have a better foundation to measure the ROI of your investment.
#2. Identify what domain supports the first step toward your business vision
Let’s be honest. You cannot expect MDM to magically solve all your business issues overnight. The vast majority of successful multidomain MDM implementations are done with step-by-step approaches, where you gradually expand your solution from one to more data domains – e.g. your Product data domain, supplier data domain or customer data domain – and build on the experiences from the first domain(s). Step two is about zooming in on the areas of your business that will benefit most from better data quality and data processes and then focus on that. Is your vision to compete on ‘fastest with new products’? Then your product data may be the place to start. Or is it ‘providing the best customer service’? Then it’s probably customer data you need to focus on. Again, concentrate on what can be expected to bring you the greatest business value. And it is not necessarily the area that is the easiest or most obvious to fix.
One of the challenges of Master Data Management and other data investments is that it can be hard to prove its business value in tangible quantities. But today, every ambitious enterprise wants to measure and analyze the Return on Investment (ROI) of every single investment.
