Tuesday 18 October 2011

UID has woken up India to MDM

Couple of years back MDM solutions was not even heard in India. Even though MDM had arrived in various other parts of the world including countries like China and Philippines, India had still not woken to that. Any customer that you would go in India like banks and government sectors, it was difficult to make them understand the concept of MDM. Even if they understood there were questions and concerns around basic infrastructure to support that and a big dilemma on the quality of their data. Data Quality is a big throttle to the MDM.

But the story is a little different now. MDM solution was started being conceptualized in various sectors in India with UID. It had become simple to explain MDM to customers if you would just say UID. The statement 'It would give the Unique Identification to each and every customer that you have" rang a bell. It was even easier to explain to my father as to what is the product that I work on. :-)

There is a very interesting video on You Tube also on MDM which is my personal favorite. Do have a look at that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC17e0HAQg8&feature=related

The IOD event in Las Vegas will showcase some of the interesting use cases of MDM with respect to Retail, Telco and Government sector. All what you wanted to know about IBM MDM will be there at IOD.


http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/2011-conference/im-forum.html

Thursday 6 October 2011

Make verses Buy

Think of a situation where there is a desperate need and desire to eat a chocolate cake. Now in order to make it you would need flour, egg, coco powder, some essence, baking powder, eggs and in case the person is vegetarian then lots of cream. So you would either go to the market buy all these items and then make it at home. The other option is order the same and you might get it in half the time and effort. Definitely if you are not an experienced baker you would choose the second option.

The same debate happened in my last customer visit. The customer thinks that they have a solution which is some what similar to MDM and if they enhance it further they can make it a complete MDM solution. However what they fail to understand is MDM is not a software installation but a journey. It is not only to give to that single customer view but taking that view to the next step which helps them making further decisions on long term future and goals. However one can still go ahead and build an MDM solution if the company understands its own requirement around MDM. If it has experts who have knowledge on this domain and can build this solution. If they do not then it is better to ask the ‘experts’ and their solution rather than start building it else that would lead to failure.

The other reason could be when the company is caught in such dilemmas is when they do not have the long term goal set. Unfortunately a lot of companies especially in growth market still do not understand this because probably they look at short term benefits and probably miss the bigger picture.

Moral of the story, build if you know what you want else get the experts.