Master Data

instant Single Customer View

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

Achieving a Single Customer View (SCV) is a core driver for many data quality improvement and Master Data Management (MDM) implementations.

As most data quality practitioners will agree, the best way of securing data quality is getting it right the first time. The same is true about achieving a Single Customer View. Get it right the first time. Have an instant Single Customer View.

The cloud based solution I’m working with right now does this by:

  • Searching external big reference data sources with information about individuals, companies, locations and properties as well as social networks
  • Searching internal master data with information already known inside the enterprise
  • Inserting really new entities or updating current entities by picking  as much data as possible from external sources

instant Single Customer View

Some essential capabilities in doing this are:

  • Searching is error tolerant so you will find entities even if the spelling is different
  • The receiving data model is real world aligned. This includes:
    • Party information and location information have separate lives as explained in the post called A Place in Time
    • You may have multiple means of contact attached like many phones, email addresses and social identities

How do you achieve a Single Customer View?

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Master Data Management in the Utility Sector

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl4 Comments

Making vertical MDM (Master Data Management) solutions, being MDM solutions prepared for a given industry, seems to become a trend in the MDM realm.

Traditionally many MDM solutions actually are strong in a given industry or a few related industries.

This is also true for the MDM solution I’m working with right now, as this solution has gained traction in the utility sector.

So, what’s special (and not entirely special) about the utility sector?

Here are three of my observations:

Exploiting big external reference data

As examined in the post instant Data Quality at Work the utility sector may gain much in using all the available external reference data available in the party master data domain, including:

  • Consumer/citizen directories
  • Business directories
  • Address directories
  • Property directories

However, if data quality shouldn’t be a joke, this means using the best national data sources available as many of the world-wide data sources is this domain are far from providing the precision, accuracy and timeliness needed in the utility sector.

Location precision

Managing locations is a big thing in the utility sector. The post called Where is the Spot explains how identifying locations isn’t as simple as we may use to think in daily life.

This is indeed also true in the utility sector where the issue also includes managing many different locations for the same customer fulfilling different purposes at the same time.

The products

puzzleThe electricity supply part of the utility sector share a lot of issues with the telco sector when it comes to fixed installations and the products and services are in fact the same in some cases which also as a consequence means that  some organizations belongs to both sectors.

This is also a danger with vertical MDM solutions as there may be several best-of-breed options for a given organization, which eventually will result in choosing more than one platform and thereby introducing the silos which MDM in first place was supposed to eliminate.

Connecting CRM and MDM with Social Network Profiles

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As told on DataQualityPro recently in an interview post about the Benefits of Social MDM, doing social MDM (Master Data Management) may still be outside the radar of most MDM implementations. But there are plenty of things happening with connecting CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and social engagement.

While a lot of the talk is about the biggest social networks as FaceBook and LinkedIn, there are also things going around with more local social networks like the German alternative to LinkedIn called Xing.

Xing02

Last week I followed a webinar by Dirk Steuernagel of MRM24. It was about connecting your SalesForce.com contact data with Xing.

As said in the MRM24 blog post called Social CRM – Integration von Business Netzwerken in Salesforce.com:

“Our business contacts are usually found in various internal and external systems and on non-synchronized platforms. It requires a lot of effort and nerves to maintain all of our business contacts at the different locations and keep the relevant information up to date.”

(Translated to English by Google and me).

Xing01

We see a lot of connectors between CRM systems and social networks.

In due time we will also see a lot of connectors between MDM and social networks, which is a natural consequence of the spread of social CRM. This trend was also strongly emphasized on the Gartner (the analyst firm) tweet chat today:

GartnerMDM chat and social MDM

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What’s so special about your party master data?

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My last blog post was called Is Managing Master Data a Differentiating Capability? The post is an introduction to a conference session being a case story about managing master data at Philips.

During my years working with data quality and master data management it has always struck me how different organizations are managing the party master data domain while in fact the issues are almost the same everywhere.

business partnersFirst of all party master data are describing real world entities being the same to everyone. Everyone is gathering data about the same individuals and the same companies being on the same addresses and having the same digital identities. The real world also comes in hierarchies as households, company families and contacts belonging to companies which are the same to everyone. We may call that the external hierarchy.

Based on that everyone has some kind of demand for intended duplicates as a given individual or company may have several accounts for specific purposes and roles. We may call that the internal hierarchy.

A party master data solution will optimally reflect the internal hierarchy while most of the business processes around are supported by CRM-systems, ERP-systems and special solutions for each industry.

Fulfilling reflecting the external hierarchy will be the same to everyone and there is no need for anyone to reinvent the wheel here. There are already plenty of data models, data services and data sources out there.

Right now I’m working on a service called instant Data Quality that is capable of embracing and mashing up external reference data sources for addresses, properties, companies and individuals from all over the world.

The iDQ™ service already fits in at several places as told in the post instant Data Quality and Business Value. I bet it fits your party master data too.

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Is Managing Master Data a Differentiating Capability?

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl1 Comment

If you are a Master Data Management (MDM) fanatic seeing the MDM solution as the centre of the universe and you plan to attend the MDM Summit Europe 2013 then you might as well start to work on your consistency in booing and your accuracy in throwing rotten tomatoes.

In the session called Multi-Entity MDM for the Enterprise Bert Hooyman will shock you by telling that managing master data is not considered a differentiating capability at Royal Philips Electronics.

The solution at Philips is based on the information factory idea and built upon data warehouse technology. Master data and transactional data are treated equally.

saving bulb MDMWhere others may struggle with Multi-Entity / Multidomain MDM the path chosen by Philips already serves multiple business cases for combining party master data and product master data.

I guess the term “a Philips light bulb moment” could have been used too much, so let me just say that I look forward to be enlightened on how to do MDM in an energy saving way.

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Social MDM and Matchback

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business partnersIn a discussion in the Social MDM group on LinkedIn the following saying came up:

“Why did 85% of the 1700 CMOs interviewed say they use social media as a communications channel and yet only 14% of them measure the ROI?”

A traditional discipline in measuring ROI from a certain market activity is, as told in the post Matchback and Master Data Management, that you try to figure out from which activity a new (prospect) customer was triggered.

The problem is that the trigger may be in one channel but the customer shows up in another channel.

Measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) in doing social media communication and social CRM also requires matchback and in order to do this you will need social master data management where the old systems of records are linked to the new systems of engagement.

As the social business has some considerations not at least around privacy, the matchback activities may very well be done by adapting Hierarchy Management in Social MDM.

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The Greenland Problem in MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl4 Comments

In a recent comment here on this blog the relevance of Master Data Management (MDM) solutions was questioned because in real business life different business units sees master data very differently though the data describes the same real world entity. And it’s not the first time I hear this argument.

The Greenland ProblemThe issue is similar to the Greenland problem in geography. When using the most common projection for visualizing a round earth on a flat map, the Mercator projection, Greenland has a true shape but will look as being of same size as Africa, though Africa is over 10 times as large as Greenland.

As examined in the post Sharing data is key to a single version of the truth this is similar to the problems in fulfilling multiple uses embracing all business units in an enterprise:

  • If a map shows a limited part of the world the difference doesn’t matter that much. This is similar to fitting the purpose of use in a single business unit.
  • If the map shows the whole world we may have all kind of different projections offering different kind of views on the world having some advantages and disadvantages like when we do enterprise MDM.

Today we have new technology coming to the rescue. If you go into Google Earth the world indeed looks round and you may have any high altitude view of an apparently round world. If you go closer the map tends to be more and more flat.

Google EarthMy guess is that the solutions to fit the multiple uses conundrum within MDM also will be offered from the cloud by having innovative solutions reflecting the real world entities and relate those to a variety of business functions used in different business units offering a range of views that supports multiple purposes of use.

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Business in the Driver’s Seat for MDM

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl4 Comments

It has always been a paradox in Master Data Management (MDM), and many other IT enabled disciplines, that while most people agree that the business part of business should take the lead, often it is the IT part of business that is running the projects.

However, at Tetra Pak, a multi-national company of Swedish origin, MDM has been approached as a business problem rather than as an IT problem.

Yesterday I touched base with Program Manager Jesper Persson at Tetra Pak.

A main reason for Tetra Pak to focus on MDM was having a very specific business problem related to master data, not an IT problem. Taking it from there the business has been in the driver’s seat for the MDM journey.

Master data quality and related data quality dimensions are seen as triggers for the essential KPI’s related to process performance. The model for getting this right is starting with the business requirements, putting the needed data governance in place, getting on with managing master data which leads to the actual master data maintenance all as part of business process management.

Jesper is telling a lot more at the Master Data Management Summit Europe 2013 in London in the session Business in the Driver’s Seat for MDM – Integrating MDM with BPM.

MDM Summit Europe 2013

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The Real Estate Domain

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl21 Comments

In the comments on the recent blog post about multidomain MDM (Master Data Management) it was discussed in what degree multidomain MDM is much more than CDI (Customer Data Integration) and PIM (Product Information Management).

While customer (or rather party) and product are important master entity types, there are of course a lot of other master entity types. The location domain is often mentioned as the third domain in MDM, and then there are some entity types most relevant for specific industries like an insurance policy or a vehicle in public transit, and in public transit we also have the calendar as an important master entity type.

Real estateOne of the entity types that doesn’t belong to party and in many ways is a different thing than a product is real estate (or real property or just property if you like).

For a realtor a real estate looks like a product of course. And it’s all about location, location, location.

Right now I’m working with the instant Data Quality framework. Here we are embracing the party domain by having access to external reference sources about individuals and companies, we are embracing the location domain by having access to external reference sources about addresses and then we are also embracing the real estate domain by having access to external reference sources about properties.

Real properties have addresses in many cases and are therefore close to the location domain. For some business processes it is a product with a product key like mentioned for realtors. For some business processes it is a security often identified by other keys than the postal address. It is related to different party roles like an occupier (or several) and an owner (or several) that may or may not be the same party (or parties).

What about you. Do you feel at home with the real estate entity type?

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MDM Summit Europe 2013 Wordle

Henrik Gabs Liliendahl2 Comments

The Master Data Management Summit Europe 2013, co-located with the Data Governance Conference Europe 2013, takes place in London the 15th to 17th April.

Here is a wordle with the session topics:

MDMDG 2013 wordle

Some of the words catching my eyes are:

Global is part of several headlines. There is no doubt about that governing master data on a global scale is a very timely subject. Handling master data in a domestic context can be hard enough, but enterprises are facing a daunting task when embracing party master data, product master data and location master data covering the diversity of languages, script systems, measuring systems, national standards and regulatory requirements. However, there is no way around the challenges when synergies in global enterprises are to be harvested.

RDM (Reference Data Management) is becoming a popular subject as well. Being successful with governing master data requires a steady hand with the reference data layer that sits on top of the master data. Some reference data sets may be small, but the importance of getting them right must not be underestimated.

Business. Oh yes. All the data stuff is there to enable business processes, drive business transformation and make business opportunities.

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