Gartner outlines data management trends

As the master data management (MDM) market grows and matures, new trends will help shape its evolution, according to Gartner. IT and business leaders involved in MDM programs need to understand these trends o they can keep their strategies up to date.

“These three key trends are generating increasing interest within the MDM market and will have a significant impact on it over the next few years,” said John Radcliffe, researchVP at Gartner.

The first of these trends is the growing demand for Multidomain MDM Software,according to the research company by 2014, 66%of Fortune 1000 organisations will have deployed two or more MDM solutions to support their enterprise MDM strategies.

Historically, most MDM initiatives have been oriented around a single master data domain. However, many organisations are now striving for a broader vision of how to achieve multidomain capabilities over time.

What constitutes the ‘multi’ in ‘multidomain’ differs by industry. Implementation phases tend to focus on individual data domains, even if the overall vision is multidomain. On the supply side an increasing number of MDM software vendors promote their products as supporting multidomain MDM. “Although this may be true at some level, it does not necessarily mean that the vendor can meet all multidomain needs in a single product,” Radcliffe said. “When evaluating MDM software products to meet multidomain MDM needs, organisations should evaluate each relevant master data domain and demand proof that the vendor can satisfy both the breadth and depth of their requirements.

The second key trends is rising adoption of MDM in the cloud, as per Gartner Inc. by 2015, 10% of packaged MDM implementations will be delivered as SaaS in the public cloud. Currently, MDM is typically implemented in on-premises solutions. Many industries, such as financial services, are reluctant to place such important, heavily shared information as master data outside the firewall. Equally, there is resistance to the idea that the governance of one’s primary information assets can be left to an outsider.

Privacy issues have also dampened adoption of software as a service (SaaS) in some regions, such as Europe. However, on-premises MDM solutions are increasingly being integrated with SaaS applications, and there are various cloud-sourced data services (such as data quality or data integration as a service) that can help with MDM implementations.

“On the supply side, very few MDM technology and service providers have, so far, developed specific MDM SaaS or PaaS products that are scalable, elastic and multitenant,” Radcliffe said. “But when they do, we expect them to exploit the cloud computing value proposition and increase their marketing of MDM in the cloud, in defined scenarios.”

The last trend is marked by the increasing links between MDM and social network, Gartner expects that by 2015, 15% of organisations will have added social media data about their customers to the customer master data attributes they manage in their MDM systems.

In a social customer relationship management (CRM) context customer insight derives from sentiment analysis and network analysis and much social media analysis will be at the aggregate trend level. This analysis could prove very useful for understanding what the market thinks about a company, its products and its services. But if a company could identify the individual person who is ‘tweeting’ and what product or service they are referring to, that information would also be valuable, as they could act on their comments to protect their brand or provide a customised experience and product offering to that person.

“The ability to recognise key people who are valuable to a company and to act on their sentiments in a timely fashion may be important, but presents several challenges. One is how to deal with the sheer volume and complexity of the data. In addition, there is a need to identify key social networkers, by using identity resolution tools, and to link their identities and social networking behavior back to your organisation’s systems,” Mr. Radcliffe said. “The MDM system maintaining the master customer profile data will be a key integration point, so in the future a company’s MDM system for customer data will have to be ‘social networking aware’.”