Prior to UnifiedVU, the Single Customer View was very much restricted to Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. According to Wikipedia,
In business, MDM comprises the processes, governance, policies, standards and tools that consistently define and manage the critical data of an organisation to provide a single point of reference. A MDM tool can be used to support master data management by removing duplicates, standardising data (mass maintaining), and incorporating rules to eliminate incorrect data from entering the system in order to create an authoritative source of master data.
Gartner defines it as:
MDM is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise including customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies and chart of accounts.
MDM Institute run by Aaron Zornes defines MDM as:
The authoritative, reliable foundation for data used across many applications and constituencies with the goal to provide a single view of the truth no matter where it lies.
The problem with MDM is that it focuses very much on core data rather than transactional data. It tries to create the basic record of company and its employee data and then harmonise it across other systems where such data is needed to retain data quality.
Whilst this is vital for many large companies, it nevertheless require expensive integration solutions.
Virtual integration pioneered by UnifiedVU offers an alternative to the traditional MDM. For us, it does not matter where the data resides. UnifiedVU technology allows data in silos to listen and respond to each other, on our Platform, without expensive system to system data exchange.
However, our technology does not fix the data quality issue. In fact it highlights the issue even further, which then forces our customers to cleanse their data. When we first launched UnifiedVU Platform internally for our own business (in tech world, this is called eating your own dog food), we spent time cleaning our data, especially removing duplicates in our CRM.
According to Aaron, here are the key players in MDM market:
And here are the Top MDM implementation companies.
The largest interest group on MDM on Linkedin now exceeds 17,000 members.
The MDM and Data Governance Summit is taking place in New York next week, which expects to attract over 400 professionals.
It’s great to connect the dots. Wonder whether Aaron Institute collaborates with the newly created Customer Data Platform Institute, which I covered recently.