A recent post on this blog was called Three Stages of MDM Maturity. This post ponders the need to extend your Master Data Management (MDM) solution to external business partners and take more advantage of third party data providers. We may call this MDM 3.0.
In a comment on LinkedIn Bernard PERRINEAU says:
Starting with the most often mentioned point against extending your MDM solution to the outside Vipul Aroh of Verdantis rightfully in a comment to the post mentions a wide spread hesitancy around. I think/hope this hesitancy is the same as the hesitancy we saw when Salesforce.com first emerged. Many people didn’t foresee a great future for Salesforce.com, because putting your customer base into the cloud was seen as a huge risk. But eventually the operational advantages in most cases have trumped the thought risks.
Ironically the existents of CRM systems, in the cloud or not, is a hindrance for MDM solutions to be system of entry or support data entry for the customer master data domain. I remember when talking to a MDM vendor CEO about putting such features for customer data entry into a MDM solution his reply was something like: “Clients don’t want that, they want to consolidate downstream”. I think it is a pity that “clients want” to automate the mess and that MDM and other vendors wants to help them with that.
That said, there are IT system landscape circumstances to be overcome in order to put your MDM solution to the forefront.
But when doing that, and even when starting to do that, the advantages are plentiful. A story about a start of such a journey for customer master data is shared in the post instant Data Quality at Work. This approach is examined more in the post instant Single Customer View. To summarize you will gain both on getting data quality right the first time and at the same time save time (and time is money) in the data collection stage.
When it comes to product master data I think everyone working in that field acknowledges the insanity in how the same data are retyped, or messed around in spreadsheets, between manufactures, distributors, retailers and end users. Some approaches to overcome this are explored in the post Sharing Product Master Data. Each of these approaches has their pros and cons.
The rise of big data also points in the direction of having your MDM solution exposed to the outside as touched in the post Adding 180 Degrees to MDM.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 