What do our master data management(MDM) customers have in common? Regardless of industry, use case, region, or the type of information they are mastering, I’ve identified 10 key factors they have in common.

Carved Wax Crayons designed by Pete Goldlust

1)      Company size is $500M+

2)      Experiencing rapid company growth, likely due to mergers and acquisitions

3)      Facing a compelling event such as a new regulation (examples include WEEE in Manufacturing, Basel III in Financial Services, Sunshine Act in Pharmaceuticals) or a change in business dynamics that results in a drop in revenue or profit,  triggering a renewed focus on efficiency and cost savings

4)      Starting to view their data as a strategic asset and as a lever for strategic initiatives, but aren’t confident in the quality of their data yet (See Constellation Research’s Report on Customer Data: The Missing Link to Strategic Success by @rwang0)

5)      Experiencing pain because business-critical data is fragmented, duplicated and inconsistent across the systems in the organization. Did you know that managers at companies without MDM spend 60% more time searching for data than managers at companies with MDM? (See Creating a Complete Customer View: Best Practices in Master Data Management by Aberdeen’s @peterostrow)

6)      IT is ensuring business stakeholders are driving and funding the MDM initiative because it supports their strategic imperatives (typically the business stakeholder has a vision and MDM plays a foundational role enabling the “best version of the truth” to make that vision a reality)

 7)      Understanding the value of a multidomain MDM solution that can master more than one domain on a single platform to accommodate MDM expansion to different domains, departments and regions, rather than needing to buy another MDM system

8)      Planning a go live in 6-9 months by using a flexible data model that adapts to their business and easily accommodates changes vs. needing to hand-code changes to a vendor-supplied data model

9)      Centrally managing hierarchies of data about companies, contacts, products, vendors, assets and the managing relationships between data

10)   Supporting data governance and “auditability” with workflow management that tracks the history of changes to master data overtime, and with a platform that includes MDM, data quality scorecards and data integration

Want to learn more about our multidomain MDM solution which supports a flexible, business model-driven MDM approach?

• Read Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data Solutions by @Gartner_inc  @John_Radcliffe and Bill O’Kane which explains the two common MDM approaches

• If you are gathering MDM business requirements for an MDM solution, check out our popular Whitepaper: MDM Buyer’s Guide for IT Professionals, to access the top 10 critical MDM business requirements for a flexible solution to address current and future requirements.

• Want to understand the costs and benefits of the two common MDM approaches? Watch this TDWI Webinar: Is Your Approach to MDM Fixed or Flexible with @DavidLoshin author of the definitive book on MDM and @Ravi_Shankar_ Informatica’s MDM expert.

• Meet us in person and attend the Informatica World MDM Path, which includes 12 MDM sessions at including customer presentations from Conde Nast, Hyatt, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Queensland Police and Printemps, a French retailer.

Are you seeing other similarities between companies that are using MDM? I welcome your comments below.