Small Business Owners

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl

A challenge I encounter over and over again within Data Matching and customer Master Data Management is what to do with small business owners.

Examples of small business owners are:

  • Farmers
  • Healthcare professionals with an own clinic
  • Small family driven shop owners
  • Modest membership organisation administrators
  • Local hospitality providers as Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers
  • Independent Data Quality consultants as myself

When handling customer master data we often like to divide those into Business-to-consumer (B2C) or Business-to-business (B2B). We may have different source systems, different data models and different data owners and data stewards for each of the two divisions.

But small business owners usually belong to both divisions. In some transactions they act as private persons (B2C) and in some other transactions they act as a business contact (B2B). If you like to know your customer, have a single customer view , engage in social media and all that jazz, you must have a unique view of the person, the business and the household.

In several industries small business owners, the business and the household is a special target group with unique product requirements. This is true for industries as banking, insurance, telco, real estate, law.

So here are plenty of business cases for multi-domain Master Data Management embracing customer master data and product master data.

The capability to handle a single customer view of small business owners is in my experience very poorly fulfilled in Data Quality and Master Data Management solutions around. Here is certainly room for improvement and entrepreneurship.

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7 thoughts on “Small Business Owners”

  1. Tom 2nd February 2012 / 20:37

    Hi Henrik
    We like your blog and have linked to it on our blog http://datavote.com/liliendahl/
    We are a new data quality company and agree with a lot of what you post here. Thanks for the interesting posts and please keep them coming.

    Reply
    • Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen 2nd February 2012 / 20:53

      Thanks Tom. I just had a brief look at the dataVote concept. I find it really promising. Good luck and maybe we meet out there in the real business world someday.

      Reply
      • Tom 14th February 2012 / 07:44

        Looks like we might be in Europe this summer. I like the concept behind IDQ and would be great to meet.

  2. Ian Haynes 5th February 2012 / 20:00

    Hi Henrik, we have been building a Master Data solution that addresses this exact issue. MatchCite.com has recently gone live, there is the ability for the user to download a free trial of the MDM solution direct from the site.

    Reply
    • Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen 5th February 2012 / 21:12

      Ian, thanks for commenting. MatchCite looks very interesting. MDM in the cloud is, according to Gartner (the analyst firm), one of three trends that will shape the MDM market in the years to come, so there should be a great future ahead for you.

      Reply
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