by Angela Guess
Loraine Lawson of IT Business Edge recently interviewed Steve Jones, global leader of Master Data Management at Capgemini. Jones told Lawson, “A major thing that we see with a lot of clients is that basically they don’t have control of their master data. They need to know two things. Number one, how do they take control of it, and number two, what will the benefits be when they do take control of it? So working on those two questions is something that we do a lot of.”
He went on, “One of the things we really focus on is a business-centric approach to MDM and a concentration around the operational side. There are a lot of MDM programs out there, very technical-focused, doing an OK job of data matching, data quality and those sort of pieces, but lacking the focus on actually how does it work operationally for business. When you on-board a customer, a supplier, a product or whatever, how are you actually getting on board? How are you going to make the modifications to it? How is that information consumed? What business processes does that information actually impact?”
He added, “People talk about single-domain and multi-domain MDM. From our perspective, technically, it’s all multi-domain. But from a business perspective, there are three key areas for master data management. The first one is customer-centric and that’s not just the customer as an individual or organization. It’s the customer, the products they buy, because there’s no point in having, from a customer’s perspective, a single view of the customer when you can’t present a single view of the products you’re selling.”
photo credit: Capgemini
