Taking full control
- Article 6 of 6
- Database Marketing, September 2006
Enthusiasm for customer data integration and master data management has finally reached the boardroom. Robert Buckley discusses whether this is good or bad news for marketing's own customer data agenda.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages
Sometimes, it takes an abbreviation to make a technology popular. Sometimes, it even takes two. For years, marketing has been extolling the virtues of a single customer – and potentially prospect – database for the enterprise. With data being cleaned and updated for everyone in an organisation whenever there’s a customer contact point, not only will marketing see benefits from having access to all possible information about customers, but other departments will be able to cut costs and get a more accurate understanding of customers. Unfortunately, the single customer view failed to find much traction.
Now, it seems with the advent of the twin abbreviations CDI (customer data integration) and MDM (master data management, which focus on integrating all enterprise data, rather than just customer or prospect data), the rest of the enterprise is finally taking the single customer view seriously. More and more organisations are beginning projects and starting pilot schemes designed to unify enterprise. Forrester Research predicts growth rates of 42% in 2006, 35% in 2007, and 30% in 2008 for software licences and professional services related to CDI. The question is, if marketing now has to share its data and cleaning skills with the rest of the enterprise, will it find itself losing control of its own data in this CDI age?
The real reason for CDI’s growth in popularity isn’t especially clear. Although concerns about compliancy will figure in some companies’ outlook, only a small percentage of organisations are actually affected by compliancy requirements.
Similarly, advances in technology don’t provide any particular clues. Although there is growing support for CDI and MDM from mainstream vendors such as SAP, which had its own MDM product for some years and added A2i’s MDME to its portfolio last year, much of this technology has been available for some time.
The advent of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) hasn’t really provided anything except a more suitable platform for CDI and a reason to discuss it, rather than that final piece that solves the single-view technological jigsaw puzzle. While some organisations such as Harrods have implemented CDI using a SOA, that’s a choice made from practicality rather than enablement.
In fact, according to Gartner analyst Andrew White, technology has little to do with the increase in CDI and MDM’s popularity. “Despite vendor claims, master data management has more to do with governance, process, data quality, metadata management and stewardship than simply technology.”
Instead, according to Arthur Kay, managing director of Synaxis, the increased interest is simply because “it’s suddenly dawning on people as a good thing to do.” It’s a viewpoint corroborated by Andy Hayler, chief strategist and founder of Kalido.
“What we’ve seen in early customers is it’s in response to very hard-nosed business issues and a dawning realisation by large companies that ERP has not fixed the problems of producing a single customer view.”
Harrods, for example, realised it was losing out considerably by having different silos of customer data. David Llamas, Harrods’ IT director, recalls that the move towards a single customer view was motivated mainly by the costs of managing the company’s various silos. “It was a complex environment that was difficult and expensive to manage, with systems not integrated.”
But for whatever reasons, CDI and MDM are creeping into the enterprise, they bring substantial benefits to marketing and other departments. By having a single customer view tied into all systems throughout the enterprise, marketing can have data that has already been cleaned to a reasonably high standard; any new data can be matched and automatically deduped on the fly; all customer and prospect contact points will be known so messages can be more accurately targeted; and all of this can be done in real-time.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages