A recent Gartner report states that: “Organizations that fail to understand their use cases, desired business outcomes and customer data governance requirements have difficulty choosing between CDPs and MDM solutions, because of overlapping capabilities.”
Indeed. This topic was examined here on the blog last year in the post CDP: Is that part of CRM or MDM?
Gartner compare the two breeds of solutions this way:
- CDPs are marketing-managed tools designed for the creation, segmentation and activation of customer profiles. … These platforms have less governance functionality than MDM solutions and tend to focus on delivering a complete view through the amalgamation of data generated by digital customer interactions.
- MDM solutions are more mature technology that also enable customer 360 insights by creating and managing a central, persisted system or index of record for master customer records. They enable governance and management of the core data that uniquely identifies one customer as distinct from another. They were built to support enterprisewide sources and applications of customer data.
CDP platforms (via CRM applications) seems to hit from outside in without getting to the core of customer centrecity. MDM solutions are hitting the bullseye and some of the MDM solutions are moving inside out in the direction of extended MDM, where all customer data, not just customer master data, is encompassed under the same data governance umbrella.
Get the Gartner report Choose Between Customer Data Platforms and MDM Solutions for 360-Degree Customer Insights through Reltio here.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 