by Angela Guess
Frank Palermo recently argued in the Virtusa blog that MDM and business process management should not be separate efforts. He writes, “While the linkage between business process management (BPM) and master data management (MDM) initiatives has been explored for some time, it’s only now that we’re beginning to see companies truly think about these initiatives as fully integrated programs. For quite some time, I have been a strong advocate for the convergence of BPM and MDM initiatives and how companies should NOT treat these as disparate efforts. For instance, how can companies talk about streamlining core business processes, such as their Trouble to Resolve, or other key customer care processes without having a unified view of the customer? It’s hard to optimize a process without trusted data. This seems fairly intuitive, but still, most companies were not connecting the dots just yet.”
Palermo goes on, “But the times may be changing. While MDM investments have traditionally been justified through the promise of smarter decisioning and insights, we are now starting to see BPM initiatives more frequently emerge at the forefront to help justify parallel investments in MDM solutions. The ability to synchronize a companies’ ‘master’ data – whether it be customer data, product data, supplier data or transaction data – across applications has tremendous value when considering process optimization opportunities. The trick may be that the ‘data’ guys have stopped talking about MDM and are starting to talk more about the business process or objectives and benefits that businesses will see from trusted unified data. Vernacular is a powerful thing.”
