There's Hope for Mastering Data
One of the ugly truths about IT is that we collect so much data that more often than not, the data we have collected is conflicted. This situation most often arises because there multiple isolated systems that have different records about the same thing. For instance, it’s not uncommon for companies to have multiple divisions that interact with the same customer, but the information about that customer is either different or conflicts with the data that another division has on the same customer.
This situation invariably leads to lost opportunities and lots of additional expense whenever a company decides to bring in data management experts to try and reconcile the systems in question.
The lost opportunity part of this equation is particularly vexing because companies are always trying to get a total view of the customer so they can figure out what other needs that customer may have in order to sell them more products and services. But that’s hard to do when you have so much conflicting information about a customer, who is often left wondering why the company they are doing business with doesn’t seem to know the totality of the relationship.
The expense part of this equation kicks in when executives try to reconcile this issue by usually bringing in an army of consultants that bill by the hour. These high-priced specialists tend to rely on equally expensive tools from companies such as IBM, Oracle and BEA to try and solve the problem usually over a multi-year period.
The good news is that there is a relatively new discipline called master data management (MDM) where a select number of vendors such as Purisma are building products that can actually go out and find all the records in various systems that are related to a particular customer or event. And the best part is that rather than being a collection of tools that IT organizations or consultants have to stitch together, the new offerings are packaged sets of tools that can establish the relationship between different records in days and weeks rather than months and years.
It remains to be seen how mainstream this whole MDM area gets, but it definitely seems to be targeting areas where customers have serious points of pain that are so old people just got use to living with the agony. The real issue here is that companies actually do need to know what they already know about the customer. The problem is that until now the tools for learning what we already now have been relatively crude and expensive. Hopefully, that’s about to finally change for the better.
