A recent well commented blog post by Andrew White of Gartner, the analyst firm, debates What’s Happening in Master Data Management (MDM) Land?
The post is an answer to a much liked and commented LinkedIn status post by Ramon Chen, Chief Product Officer of Reltio.
In his post Andrew connects the classic dots: How does technology lead to business outcome? Especially the use of cloud solutions and the multi-tenant aspect is in the focus. Andrew asks: What do you see “out there”?
My view is that multi-tenant is not just about offering the same subscription based cloud solutions to a range of clients. It is about making clients sharing the same business ecosystem work in the same MDM realm. This is the platform described in Master Data Share.
Oh, and what does that have to do with business outcome? A lot. Organizations will not win the future the race by optimizing there inhouse MDM capabilities alone. With the rise of digitalization, they need to connect with and understand their customers, which I believe is something Reltio is good at. Furthermore, organisations need to be much better at working with their business partners in a modern way, including at the master data level. The business outcome of this is:
- Having complete, accurate and timely data assets needed for understanding and connecting with customers. You will sell more.
- Having a fast and seamless flow of data assets, not at least product information, to and from your trading partners. You will reduce costs.
- Having a holistic view of internal and external data needed for decision making. You will mitigate risks.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Henrik,
As usual you are a couple of steps ahead in your articulation and vision.
When Reltio was founded it wasn’t just to improve the efficiency and execution of standalone MDM, but to transcend and bring in business teams, and the entire company from various groups and departments to collaborate and work off a single shared view. From there, they could in realtime get the relevant insights, and recommended actions that were contextual to what they were tying to achieve for their business goals.
This is why we also offer Data as a Service built-into the platform. Using this capability customers can easily get 3rd Party data from data vendors, but also turn around and share the blended continuously correlated info internally within their own enterprise, and also with external trading partners, in a safe, audited and secure manner.
Thanks for weighing in on this lively debate. My hope is that the MDM community forms the best practices and perspectives of what works for them. Clearly doing the same old MDM isn’t the way to go when so much new technology is available.