Easily Amused for No Apparent Reason

I’m going to be attending the Spring 2008 MDM Summit in San Francisco March 31-April 1, so I thought it would be appropriate to brush up on the latest and greatest in Master Data Management.  In the process, I ran into three articles today that do a perfect job of tying it all together and making it real.

In Loraine Lawson’s blog Mergers and Integrations, there is a great posting on the petty power plays between the owners of different silos of corporate data (mostly customer data), which leads to the conclusion: the Master Data Management challenge is not so much a question of which data integration technology to use, but of resolving the corporate culture clash between those who are willing to share data vs. those who want to protect their turf.

While this is all good and well, my question is: who cares about Master Data Management anyway? Maybe the description of Master Data Management from an official source can explain why MDM is relevant.  According to Jill Dyché, partner of Baseline Consulting, she cites a definition from her book “Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth,” in an interview with James Powell in Enterprise Systems:

…we define MDM as “the set of disciplines and methods to ensure the currency, meaning, quality, and deployment of a company’s reference data within and across subject areas.”

What? Did anybody get that? To borrow from a blog posting on another topic, Business Intelligence, Ann All says:

IT folks who throw out terms like ETL and OLAP, blather about “single versions of the truth” and get bogged down in discussions over how many terabytes of data their business intelligence tools can handle are missing out on a rare opportunity to wow business users.

Ann’s whole blog post is about telling the customer stories about how Business Intelligence has helped actual companies.

Well, providence supplied me with my story via one of my Google Alerts emails. A fantastic article in Internet Retailer by Don Davis entitled Do You Know Me? brings it all together.  The article makes absolutely no mention of jargon such as MDM or Single Version of the Truth, but talks about how Petco, REI and Build-A-Bear are able to more effectively target their customers with personalized offers and messages based on their offline and online purchasing history, and web browsing trends.

Price interviews, among others, John Lazarchic, director of e-commerce at Petco.  Here’s the money quote from the article:

It’s all aimed at making offers relevant. “If a customer buys 40-pound bags of dog food in the store because he doesn’t want to pay shipping charges, I want to keep marketing messages for store stuff store-specific,” Lazarchic says. “But if he’s buying three and a half pound bags of cat food online, I’ll send him online cat offers. I want to keep it specific by channel and pet type.”

So what is MDM?  It’s all about cat food, or rather consolidating data on your customers from various sources so you can market the right cat food using the right delivery method to the right customer.  How did Petco get this data?  They built a data warehouse, merging customer data stored in information silos gleaned from their e-commerce site, their online analytics engine, and their PALS loyalty system for on-site retail purchases.  Price does not mention the term Master Data Management ANYWHERE in the article, but that’s essentially what it is.

So why is MDM relevant?  Why care if you use this or that data integration technology, or if the retail marketing team or the online marketing team hordes or shares their data on the same exact customers who shop online and in their stores?  Just look to what REI, Petco, and Build-A-Bear are doing to provide a relevant and satisfying shopping experience, or rather, relationship, with their customers.

Even though I used a retail example from a retail-oriented online publication, MDM can apply to any other business scenario where different versions of information on the same physical entity exists. But these are the type of stories that make MDM real.

Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers SHPE.