Improving Your Business by Mastering Multiple Data Domains
Mastering multiple domains is the natural extension of a successful MDM project. Typically, organizations start mastering a single domain, such as person. Once successful, they quickly realize the addition of location and products or services can not only solve complex business issues, but will open new models and opportunities to extend value across the enterprise.
The value of multidomain master data management is derived from the ability to extract insight from the complex relationships between customers, parties, external supplier’s partners, and the complexity of the goods and services they provide.
This insight will provide substantial business benefit to the organization. First, mastering a domain provides the enterprise with a single version of the truth for the entity, resulting in reduced duplicates, fewer inconsistencies and a solid, accurate representation of important data. Second, the relationships between these mastered domains can support and improve valuable operational and analytical business processes, resulting in tangible improvement to the bottom and top line.
Organizations are starting down the multidomain path in order to reap these benefits today. For instance:
- A service organization is optimizing operations and improving service by using location to identify multiple customers under a single roof.
- A criminal justice agency is protecting its community by connecting the dots between people, places, things (such as weapons or vehicles) and events, in order to more effectively identify and catch criminals and persons of interest in real time.
- A retail business is reducing risk, improving sales effectiveness and increasing customer satisfaction and retention by using customer, product and location information to gain a reliable understanding of products and services available at a location, and creating marketing programs to help them pitch the right product at the right location for the right customer.
- B2B organizations with large inventories of parts cross-sell and up-sell by mastering customer, location and product data.
- Healthcare enterprises are able to properly identify providers and their relationships with patients and to associate providers to outcomes to measure the value of the care they provide.
Organizations that decide to master more than one data domain are best served by deploying an MDM architecture that has a coherent, unified approach to dealing with all master data types.
Mastering multiple domains requires an MDM solution that provides the following:
- Flexible data model.
Your MDM solution should provide standard data model templates as a baseline for quick delivery time and allow you to easily modify the templates to suit your particular data needs.
- Open integration options.
Your chosen MDM platform should offer multiple production-ready integration options from proven web services to standard ETL and batch-based interfaces.
- Accurate relationship engine.
Your solution should be capable of matching more than just one type of data. It should also be able to relate records from different domains; for example, match a product to the company that provides that product. This not only helps your business identify unique customers and products, it eases the burden of data stewardship.
- Scalable, high-performance architecture.
The solution should scale to meet the needs of a growing organization. It should support bulk data migration as well as sub-second response times over hundreds or even billions of records.
- Third-party data integration and hierarchical data views.
Your MDM solution should be able to synthesize third-party data sources and hierarchies with your existing data, providing insight into business relationships
If your business requirements include multidomain MDM, Initiate can help you pave the way to a successful implementation.