4 Tips for a Successful MDM Project

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Over the last 2–3 years, I’ve seen a notable resurgence in demand for Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, especially in the mid-market and nonprofit sectors. In addition, at least anecdotally, the success rate for these initiatives seems to be higher than in years past.

So what gives? Two words: Customer data.

Organizations have never had richer, more actionable data about their customers, but that data is increasingly spread across disparate enterprise systems and cloud applications. In the customer space, having actionable intelligence helps lean organizations allocate scarce resources to attract loyal customers, prevent churn, and drive down customer acquisition and retention costs by focusing on the highest-value or most at-risk customers. This means there is real value in having reliable, consistent customer data, and helps explain why MDM is on the radar for more organizations. Many organizations are also focusing on related efforts around Customer Experience, Customer Journey Mapping, and 360-Degree View of the Customer, which are further helping drive MDM demand. And lastly, MDM solutions have continued to evolve and consolidate and have gotten cheaper and easier to implement as a result.

But, more importantly, why might these more recent MDM initiatives be perceived as more successful? Today’s MDM initiatives tend to be focused on resolving specific issues with managing customer data across disparate on-prem and SaaS platforms. This is in contrast to MDM initiatives from years past, where the focus often seemed to be on attaining ambiguously defined “enterprise data/information management” and “data governance” maturity. While Herculean MDM and data governance efforts — complete with technology platforms, full-time data management professionals, and formal data governance organizations and committees — may have made sense for large multinationals and companies with complex data ecosystems, many small and medium-sized organizations who attempted to implement these complex MDM solutions didn’t ultimately realize the value needed to sustain the effort. It’s no surprise that more recent efforts to wrangle customer data that have been smaller, more agile, and more focused on an agreed-upon set of achievable outcomes, might have a higher success rate.

With this in mind, here are a few tips for a successful MDM initiative:

1. Right-size the effort. MDM, like most investments, is subject to diminishing returns. Focus MDM on the highest value data that needs mastering. In most organizations, this is customer and product data. The most successful initiatives I’ve seen stay focused on enabling a few core use cases and then grow organically from there. Remember the lesson given to us by the US Navy: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
2. Stay agile and deliver results often. MDM will almost inevitably require a multi-year effort to be fully integrated into an organizations’ technology ecosystem. Teams that choose to go off into a back room for 12+ months to develop a “big bang” MDM solution will almost assuredly run into major setbacks, perhaps even failure. It is imperative that MDM work be tied to business value, and the best way to ensure this is to deliver results to the business early and often, get user feedback, and adapt accordingly. Focusing on achievable results and building a Minimum Viable Product first are great ways to accomplish this.
3. Build a great team. A strong MDM team needs a mix of skills that include MDM strategy and solution architecture, MDM platform/technology expertise, knowledge of current and future business applications and IT infrastructure, MDM and application integration engineers and architects, IT and business SMEs, and data governance/stewardship process SMEs. Last but not least, a great Solution Owner and can make all the difference.
4. Executive sponsorship and organizational buy-in are key. Strong business and IT support is critical for a successful MDM initiative. Few efforts will touch as broad an array of systems and business processes as MDM, so having buy-in and support across the board is a must-have. The MDM implementation team will absolutely need to rely on help from other teams and process owners, so take the time to build relationships with other teams and provide them and their managers with as much visibility as possible into upcoming asks for help and their role in ongoing participation in MDM and governance processes.