Is MDM (Master Data Management) dead? 

Author: Lochan Narvekar . August 5, 2019

I know, it’s a provocative question, but hey, I got your attention! OK, but on a more serious note, a lot of my colleagues and well-wishers have been telling me to divert my attention to other, more exciting opportunities, like Big Data, Cloud, and AI. And, I have, over the past 3 months been talking to several executives, and IT and business leaders, to gauge the future. This article should contextualize MDM for IT leaders and executives, explaining MDM’s new role. And should also help those of my colleagues, who hitched their wagon to MDM and now find themselves at an interesting fork. 

Let’s start briefly by defining MDM. Simply put, its managing lifecycle of your customer, product, and depending on needs, employee, partners, and other master entities. Lifecycle means, as an example, from the time you acquire a customer as a lead, to all the way till you provide support, and hopefully renew your product/service with them. That’s the basic idea. One can argue till the cows come home, if this is done better in a separate hub-like tools or natively in an existing app, but either way, the concept remains the same. 

I was very fortunate to be at the foundation of MDM industry lifecycle, when at a company I worked for, our CIO came to me and dropped CIO magazine showing this new word on the front cover. I had built some of the MDM and PLM (product lifecycle management) tools for a large software company, and having evangelized those tools through US and abroad, was known to a few as an MDM expert. We didn’t get a large budget. But, we did deliver one of the first successful MDM programs, saving millions, all without using any separate tool, by simply applying common sense MDM principles. [See them here, re-posted here from my article 10+ years back; Medium article ] 

Shifting the gear, what I saw in the valley since mid-2000s, is a logical progression of using MDM, either under existing leadership, or if the company was big enough to justify data quality gains, a separate leadership. But MDM has been practiced, in one form or the other. It’s also been abused, by unreasonable expectations, large IT investments, mediocre products, long project timelines, and lack of upfront focus. 

In the second MDM industry act, as many software companies have jumped on the MDM band-wagon, 2 things have happened. First, lot of the vendors have found their niches (primary cash cows), life science, channel catalogs, integration, etc. Second, 2 groups have emerged, one that still touts a separate hub or tool concept, while others, more traditional players are moving MDM tools under the existing applications; like Sales cloud etc. 

This distinction is important to understand the new wave of MDM concepts and corresponding features that are coming along. The vendors that have stayed on “MDM as a separate tool” path, needed to embrace the market forces that are moving toward un-structured/semi-structured data exploration from mere structured data management. Lot of them have done this successfully, but in the process, coined different marketing jargons, like Advanced MDM, modern MDM, which are aptly fitting and justified. More to the point, they are targeting advanced use cases, like in life sciences, or light ABM (account based marketing) capabilities, or using machine learning automatically to clean data, and many more. 

And this is a great and exciting news for wider MDM community, in the enterprise world, that has stuck with traditional MDM. They cannot resist this wave anymore by simply using MDM to connect operational systems or to clean/govern the master data for analytics. They have to look at these new-age use cases that are proliferating in various business functions, and need to understand how MDM can help there. I can personally vouch to the fact that it’s hard for IT executives to understand MDM’s role outside the old paradigm. For example, how can we use MDM platform when an ABM vendor (or in-house team) has done its magic on pin-pointing website user? Should this flow through MDM platform for support/customer service to use? (More on these use cases in a later article). IT executives already have their hands full and leaders asking money for well-established use cases. So it must fall to people like me and my colleagues to help them understand MDM’s modified role. 

And vendors, both product and services, are trying very hard, I see. Some of my more successful colleagues have jumped the chasm from structured to un-structured data, and are proudly using MDM to bridge the chasm. But more work needs to be done. I remember the age old question I was asked in the interviews, “Where does MDM sit, Business or IT?” My take even today is, it must be driven by business drivers/outcomes and implemented by IT; just that as this article proposes, more exciting use cases have to be understood, after all customer and product data are foundational bed-rocks of an enterprise.