5 key mdm best practices - image relay · 2019. 10. 25. · the project began. let’s look at the...

MDM BEST PRACTICES5 KEY

Discover 5 key MDM strategy best practices around people & technology, getting started, the MDM landscape, the why vs how and measurement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

People vs. Technology1

The Why vs. The How4

Benefits of Starting Small2

Measurement and Showing Value5

Understanding the Landscape3

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© 2019 Profisee Group, Inc. profisee.com

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PEOPLE VS. TECHNOLOGY

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PEOPLE OVER TECHNOLOGY: HOW A FRUITFUL INVESTMENT IN MDM STARTS WITH PEOPLE

There are many best practices that successful companies follow who leverage MDM to support their bushiness strategy. One of these best

practices is focusing on people versus technology. Let’s examine closer.

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ESTABLISH A PEOPLE-FIRST APPROACH FROM THE STARTWhen organizations first engage with master data manage-ment, they often make the mistake of getting the technology in place before anything else. This can be an expensive mis-take and can often be referred to as the ‘technology first’ ap-proach.

The problem with this ‘technology first’ approach is that many organizations struggle to get the right people on board along with the necessary organizational alignment to make an in-vestment in MDM technology frutiful for the company. These struggles usually stem from the lack of creating a business value proposition that is needed for stakeholders to buy-in across the organization.

Defining a people-first approach that aligns business objec-tives with stakeholder needs, along with making their jobs more efficient and more productive will help mitigate these types of organizational struggles. Once this lens is established, getting the people behind the technology excited and moti-vated is much easier.

If you lead with people and work towards getting them on board with master data management before purchasing the technology, this helps to communicate business value, how it’s going to improve their work and provides a sense of ownership towards the holistic MDM strategy.

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TIE PEOPLE TO A BUSINESS CASEMDM technology can solve a wide array of business problems, but getting there re-quires a people driven collaborate under-standing of your organizational challenges and how to apply technology to solve these problems.

Involving both IT and business stake hold-ers ahead of purchasing MDM technology is mission critical to aligning organizational challenges with business outcomes and how a technology purchase will shape them. Giving all stakeholders, from the executive down to the end user, the opportunity to provide input into the overarching business case for MDM, will help build trust, a sense of ownership and better ensure long term

success.

Understanding how organizational strategy aligns with stakeholder needs and internal processes will help you

put people at the forefront of an MDM investment.

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CREATE A CLEAR PICTUREOne of the biggest challenges is getting stakeholders invested. If you can do this upfront by clearly explaining the value and how it will positively affect their opera-tions, they will feel better about moving forward. Those involved will also begin to realize you’re actually impact-ing the quality of the data and improving the whole process.

Technology needs to be partnered with the business. Instead of technology forcing something onto the busi-ness that may appear as extra work, when implemented well, it pulls everyone onto the same page to pursue a unified goal. By focusing on the end user, you are able to give them the ability and the flexibility to manage their data, but with the controls and framework to manage an organization.

When stakeholders can see a holistic view of how MDM will improve the entire business, they will begin to get on

board with changes meant to drive it forward.

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BENEFITS OF STARTING SMALL

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When thinking about master data management projects many companies make the mistake of trying to deliver a

large, complex solution with a long runway. As a result, MDM projects are often slow, onerous, and don’t produce value for

months or years. This is a substantial problem.

Instead project champions or owners should focus onquick wins that are fit for the business purpose at hand. This approach helps drive success sooner than later, allows com-panies to accumulate some quick wins, and build toward a

strategy that leads to long-term success.Let’s explore the benefits of starting small in more detail.

Instead project champions or owners should focus on quick wins that are fit for the business purpose at hand.

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STARTING SMALL DRIVES FASTER TIME-TO-VALUEMany organizations make the mistake of looking at MDM projects such as the ‘Customer 360’ and want to solve it all immediately. The problem with this mantra is that it sets the standard that a project is not success-ful unless implemented for the entire organization.

Because many organizations choose not to start small, these types of projects often fail. The primary reason is speed; MDM initiatives often move too slowly to be valuable. It’s not uncommon to start a ‘Custom-er 360’ MDM project and then 12 months later IT still hasn’t delivered a master data file that business users find valuable. The IT team defines the scope and starts building toward a “perfect record.” But, the idea of a perfect master record, while desirable, isn’t a static state because the data your business collects is always changing. What follows then is the inevitable finger pointing and executives wondering why they ever ap-proved the project in the first place.

If customer data, ie the ‘Customer 360’, is most important to your busi-ness users, then your MDM initiatives should focus on specific sections of customer information first to drive a faster time-to-value. The emphasis here is not on achieving the ‘Customer 360’ or the “perfect record’ across the organization initially, but rather on quick and targeted activity that emphasizes the goals of business users; starting small.

Because many organizations choose not to start small, these types of projects often fail. The primary reason is speed; MDM initiatives often move too slowly to be valuable.

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STARTING SMALL MINIMIZES DIMINISHED VALUEIf your company is engaged in an MDM project where you’re not regularly seeing measurable wins, this often can threaten to derail the project in its entirety or prolong accomplishing the MDM project goal. Failing to start small puts MDM projects at risk for diminished value where prolonging results and can push project success so far out in time to extent that the data and the business problems it was centered on have actually changed since the project began.

Let’s look at the proverbial ‘Customer 360’ MDM project as good example of why starting small is important to driving value when the clock is ticking. It’s not surprising that consumers generate a substantial amount of data each day, and the master databases that result from ‘Customer 360’ MDM initiatives are transformative in extracting value from their data. But if a company chooses to tackle all of their customer data at once versus starting with a smaller data set that will improve strategic decision making, this approach will slow pace of the ‘Customer 360’ project and that puts the customer data at risk of being outdated by the time it’s unified. This is results in diminished value with MDM projects for business users who need to make decisions and engage at the speed of their customers.

How then to access the benefits of MDM at the pace your business needs? The answer lies in starting small.

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STARTING SMALL BUILDS A ROADMAP FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS

Starting small allows companies to more easily map out MDM projects and also provides a foun-dation for repeat successes throughout the larger scope of the project. As we’ve done in previous sections, let’s use the ‘Customer 360’ as an example for how starting small can help map out long-term success.

With most ‘Customer 360s’ the end goal typically is building out a centralized, consolidated, de-duped and cleansed view of customer data across many different lines of business and applications. When there is a large project of this scope on deck, as many ‘Customer 360s’ can be, laying a roadmapof smaller, bite sized goals along the way will helpcompanies better measure progress and showvalue over time.

Laying a roadmap of smaller, bite sized goals along the way will help companies better

measure progress and show value over time.

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This roadmap broken out into smaller pieces might include when you add stakeholders into the next iteration or when you think about bringing in additional data from different lines of business into the project. It’s also ben-eficial to identify key master data entities (Customer, Product, Supplier, Account and so on), identify the differ-ent sources to be integrated, decide on features of MDM to be implemented, and prioritize each one during the roadmap development phase; all in small phases.

An effective way to approach executing on smaller, bite sized roadmaps often involves two to four week sprints. These sprints make enable project teams to quickly show progress and get through the necessary building and testing cycles.

If you take away nothing else from this section, take this: for long term MDM projects such as a ‘Customer 360’, it is important to build the entire vision and roadmap at the beginning with starting small in mind. This will ul-timately help anticipate and plan upcoming changes with the MDM technology, business landscape and phase your projects into smaller, bite sized goals for long-term success.

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UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE

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Over the years we’ve seen a number of patterns evolve within our customers on their projects. From this, we’ve noticed some common best practices our most successful customers always follow. One of those is understanding the current landscape.

Let’s discuss how macro/micro trends, timing, organizational changes and external factors all can impact the MDM land-

scape before or during a project.

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UNDERSTAND THE MACRO AND MICRO PERSPECTIVEUnderstanding the landscape means looking broadly, from a macro perspective, as well as narrowly from a micro per-spective. You need to have a clear picture of what’s going on in the world and within your industry, and what’s going on within your company, too.

One of the first landscape trends to assess relevant to mas-ter data management and how to apply it to business strat-egy is looking at the macro perspective within your indus-try. Every industry typically has something going on with respect to new regulations like GDPR, technology trends such as digital transformation or major shifts in consumer/purchasing behavior.

Macro trends often affect the environment in which busi-nesses operate, even if the business itself doesn’t seem related to the subject area of the trend. Once these macro trends occur many businesses will pivot to either capital-ize on opportunities at hand or pivot to mitigate risks as the changes occur. Having an understanding of the macro perspective in your industry will help shape how you think about master data and how it impacts the business beyond the short term.

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Take the newspaper industry as a prime example. The newspaper business model has completely changed over the past decade as most of the news consumption is now online. The macro trend became digital media with the advent of the iPhone and progression of broadband and broadcast technology. Newspapers had to evolve or die, and todays leading media outlets leverage digital engagement as a means to drive revenue and growth.

If you were employed by a newspaper one heels of this macro trend – from paper to digital - you’d be thinking about how digital will offer a plethora amount of data from which any newspaper organization can leverage to sell more advertisements or grow its subscriber base. This understanding would likely steer your data man-agement strategy and require you to think about how data can be centralized, consolidated, de-duplicated and cleansed across the many digital engagement platforms for monetization opportunities into the future; enter master data management.

Opposite to macro, micro takes a look at the smaller changes happening at the organizational level. This per-spective involves thinking through any major changes in strategy, or business plans within the organization that could impact how master data is used across the business.

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Take for example, an organizational shift in strategy towards improved decision making capabilities across the enterprise. To accomplish this your company is making investments in staffing and BI technology to better understand their operations, cus-tomers, financial situation, product performance, trends and a host of key business measurements. You know that one of the basic reasons the reporting is incorrect in the first place is that the operational data feeding the analytical systems is filled with errors, duplications and inconsistencies.

You also know that if the organization wants to shift towards improved decision making via its analytical applications, invest-ments in technology and staffing will not help – poor quality re-porting has to be fixed at its source, the poor quality data under the applications that run the business. The solution is master data management and being on the front of this micro trend will help drive how an MDM program could fit within the organi-zational strategy shift.

The takeaways is, knowing the context of what’s going on with-in the company, and the industry it operates within, is not only a best practice, but vital to buy-in and extracting value from an investment in master data.

Knowing the context of what’s going on within the company, and the industry it operates within, is not only a best practice, but vital to buy-in and extracting value from an investment in master data.

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UNDERSTAND HOW TIMING COULD IMPACT YOUR MDM EFFORTSAnother important aspect of landscape is an understanding of your timing. Being too early or too late can be just the same as failing – even if the idea itself is correct. Whatever type of MDM program or solution you’re going to try to implement, you want to make sure it’s going to be relevant within the timeframe of an existing problem.

For example, if you’re going to have a project that lasts for nine months, you need to have a problem that’s going to exist a year from now. If not, your project will become obsolete and end up wasting valuable time and money for the company. If you anticipate a large acquisition, or something that’s going to create a lot of upheaval, then a best practice is to begin driving change to bring the project to completion before the adjustment happens.

Whatever type of MDM program or solution you’re going to try to implement, you want to make sure it’s going to

be relevant within the timeframe of an existing problem.

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Timing can also play into how your MDM project fits into the scope of your entire company, and other major projects going

on simultaneously.

If your company has big changes on the horizon, whether technology or business strategy focused, knowing when these

changes will occur and making plans around timing will help keep MDM efforts on track.

If you expect a major ERP re-platform before you plan to swap out your ERPs as an ex-ample, then it will obviously affect an MDM

program.

You don’t want people blaming the MDM project for the reason why the ERP applica-

tion didn’t deploy in time.

It’s also beneficial to think through any ma-jor changes on the horizon from a business strategy perspective, and how they might af-

fect your current landscape. Being proactive in meeting with leaders and stakeholders of

other big projects will help to make sure your projects coincide well and don’t slow other

departments down.

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THE WHY VS. THE HOW

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Over the years, we’ve seen a number of patterns evolve within our customers on their projects.

From observing these patterns, there are some common best practices we see our most success-

ful customers always follow. One of those best practices is turning the focus from the “why” to the

“how” of the customer 360.

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IDENTIFY THE CORE PROBLEMBusinesses often feel their major problems center around needing a clearer view of their customer 360. In reality, that’s not a business problem. The customer 360 is an enabler.

An example of a business challenge is:

You need to increase the effectiveness of your marketing by delivering more leads per dollar spent.

It’s possible the challenge stems from needing a more ac-curate view of the customer because you’re investing a lot of money in purchasing lists, or you’re not communicating well to your customers because you don’t understand your relationship with them. By attributing a measurable value to your business problems, you can then work on solving them. It’s important to not market the business problem as customer 360.

Customer 360 is how you address a business challenge, but not the business challenge itself.

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LEARN THE DAILY CHALLENGES Gain understanding from the stakeholders for what their challenges are.

Ask questions like:• How can we drive more revenue?• How can we reduce costs?• How can we reduce a risk or compliance issue?

Understand the stakeholders’ daily challenges in detail so you can better position it for the business. Again, the solution may be that you need a better customer 360, but it’s not the challenge.

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GAIN HOLISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF THE WHOLE BUSINESSThere are often different business problems for each business segment. You can’t paint the entire world the same way when each of your businesses may have a different problem. One business might be having trouble cross-selling between different organizations. Another may need better understanding of the corporate hierarchy, so they can move up the chain and talk to larger areas. The needs for a marketing team are going to be different than for the finance team. Un-derstand your audience, and if you’re work-ing with someone in marketing, focus on the things relevant for marketing.

It’s important to focus your efforts if you understand the problems and the business segmentation within your own business before you tackle anything.

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FOCUS IN ON THE PROBLEMThere are two steps in this practice when focusing on a busi-ness problem.

1. Identify the actual, underlying business challenge or opportunity.

Use the business analyst approach and ask “why” five times. Get into the weeds with what they are really struggling with. If it’s a cross-sell opportunity, then that could have been driv-en because of past mergers and acquisitions. If you know you’re going to do more of that moving forward, talk about the specifics.

2. Focus in on the challenges.

One of the challenges most businesses have is simply making time to focus on a problem. One of the nice things about the Profisee service team is the ability to come onsite and work with customers for weeks or even months. We can help your team focus on a set of challenges and solve them.

When you commit resources to a project, you’re more likely to see it all the way through. However, if its shifted to the pile on corner of a desk, you’re not likely to be as successful because it’s not a priority.

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IDENTIFY QUICK WINS FIRSTBusinesses often feel their major problems center around Once you’ve done the work of defining the challenges you have, it helps you focus and better prioritize what’s important to drive the product to be successful.

Instead of approaching a customer with the seemingly overwhelming task of customer 360, identify three quick wins you can accomplish for them that prove beneficial and solve a problem they’ve been dealing with. Whether its cross-selling or managing customer addresses, fo-cus in on the important fields, and leave tasks like data household management for a later stage.

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MEASURE YOUR SUCCESSIt’s not the “how” that’s important for setting a foundation, but the “why.” The “how” is ulti-mately what the technology is delivering.

Ideally, this will help us measure success. This is our version of a before and after photo. This is where we can measurably show the custom-er where they were before and where they are

now. This helps set the pace for the rest of the projects, helps with establishing a budget for the project and justifies the worth of the project once it’s complete.

Are you ready to prioritize discovering challeng-es within your business to set your company on

a trajectory for long-term success?

By starting small, you’re able to easily map out the entire project and simply repeat successes

throughout the larger scope of the project.

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MEASUREMENT AND SHOWING VALUE

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Over the years, we’ve seen a number of patterns within our customer’s projects. These patterns have pointed to

the common best practices our most successful custom-ers always follow. In the context of a MDM program, very

few organizations implementing a data management program bother to define success and set measurable

goals from the start. Here are some of the best practices companies do to ensure success long term.

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1 DEFINE THE METRICS UPFRONTDeciding what you are going to measure before a project helps on the back end, so you can clearly see your results. If you don’t decide on metrics upfront, the challenge becomes more about the best scientific practices. This approach often leads to a manipulation of the data you have because you are looking for the positive bene-fits and contriving details that weren’t there. It also leaves you with blind spots that keep you from having com-plete clarity on what is going well or needs to change.

At the end of the project, once you measure the outcome, no one can debate whether or not the results are valu-able since they were defined from the start.

The best practice is to reach an agreement upfront with all the stakeholders, and define what

success looks like and how to best measure it.

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OUTLINE SPECIFIC METRICSFocus in on what you would like to discover at the end of a project. If you know specifically what you’re wanting to measure in the end, you know how to focus the business problems for consulting to solve. If you’re doing a phased approach and find other instances where the technology is going to help, you can make sure those are represented from the start. You can also find more measurements you can focus on later.

Whether it’s the second or third phase, you want to make sure to focus on those specific business problems early and then know what the measurement of success is. If you’re struggling to come up with something to mea-sure, you probably haven’t found good business chal-lenges to address. It is vital for every business challenge to bring some metric around either revenue, cost, or your ability to mitigate some aspect of risk. If you don’t have this, continue to narrow down your focus until you can define a specific metric.

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The best practice is to reach an agreement upfront with all the stakeholders, and define what

success looks like and how to best measure it.

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CAPTURE YOUR MEASUREMENTSWhile striving to be more data-driven, it is also import-ant to make better decisions in capturing your measure-ments. By first deciding on the measurements you want, and then consistently capturing them, you can begin to learn from your mistakes and take the necessary steps toward improvement. In the same vein, you also can’t repeat successes if you aren’t consistently capturing your measurements because you don’t know exactly what led to the success.

From there, you can decipher where you are and make course corrections for the future. Making appropriate changes and improving the overall process will help you reduce costs and streamline cash flow. Ultimately, you’ve got to have measurements just like you do in every other process inside your organization. This data will prove to be invaluable as you continue to see the positive benefits of capturing measurements to track success.

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In every project you should be building in margin and making the effort to capture the data, so you can talk through it once the project is complete.

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TRACK INDIVIDUAL PRODUCTIVITYNobody has a sales organization - certainly not a large or successful one - if they aren’t actually measuring the pro-ductivity of individuals. This is true in all areas of business. That is why data management within projects is business critical.

Companies should understand data on multiple levels to accurately know how they are performing. This includes product data, employee data, customer data, and the oth-er assets of the organization. If you aren’t collecting and analyzing all of this data, you don’t have a clear view of how your company is performing overall.

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NOW WHAT?As far as MDM goes, the best practice is to first make sure you have something to measure that is agreed upon pri-or to implementing the project. Once the project is complete, you’re able to use these measurements to help justi-fy and prove the value of the program.

It could be the value you expected to see isn’t there, but knowing this earlier, rather than several iterations into a project, can save your company time and money. Figuring out your blind spots and pivoting when necessary is vital for healthy, sustainable growth.

Ask yourself these questions:• Are you good stewards of your data?• Are you leveraging the data you have to its full capacity?• What are some growth areas you could work toward to achieve better data stewardship?

By asking these questions, you begin to have a better picture of where your company is. You are also able to build measurable steps toward a more holistic view of your data. Once you see the whole picture, you profit from having the ability to know if you are hitting the mark or need to pivot.

Are you ready to move your company toward better data stewardship to boost profit and eliminate time waste?

Having these measurements show trends over time and add great value to the “why” behind what you do.

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www.profisee.com

About Profisee:

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© 2019 Profisee Group, Inc.

Profisee is a leading enterprise data management company that makes it easy and affordable for any size organization to ensure a trusted data foundation. Our unique, Fast Track Your Data Management approach allows companies to accelerate their business digital strategies with enterprise data management capability.

We serve the 90% of companies yet to adopt an enterprise MDM (master data management) platform by offering the first “Fast, Affordable, and Scalable” solution. Customers no longer need to choose between cost, performance and speed. No matter where an organization is on their data management journey, we help them become strategic. Our customers have the freedom to choose their deployment, with the flexibility to deliver on premise, in the cloud, or via a hybrid model.

Profisee’s unique Total Cost Ownership model, which accelerates our cus-tomers’ success continues to lead the MDM industry, resulting in our highly referenceable and passionate customer base. Follow us on LinkedIn or visit profisee.com.

http://Profisee.com

https://www.linkedin.com/company/profisee/

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5 key mdm best practices - image relay · 2019. 10. 25. · the project began. let’s look at the...

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