Sunday 22 January 2012

MDM proposition is for Business leaders not IT Department

In market like India, the biggest challenge for selling a product like MDM is the fact that the software is sold to IT department of a company rather than business leaders. The discussion to buy a piece of software or not has still not gone to the Board of Directors or Business leader chambers. The MDM story is approached from typically by fixing the Data Quality issues and ends up becoming a Data Warehousing project along with Analytics losing its advocacy midway somewhere. This is because the customer and their IT department can see the value immediately. However the long term vision of creating a operational hub where the single version of truth can exist is something that can be envisaged as a business need rather than a technology requirement.

Companies need to have business leaders who can vision the roadmap of MDM. Currently the Growth markets customers are trying to solve their day to day problem and the IT Department of various companies are working towards that. When an MDM value proposition is given to the IT department it always gets into make vs buy discussion which becomes an ugly one. The problem needs to be approached as a roadmap where the long term vision needs to be clear. Hopefully these changes soon in countries like India where IT becomes more business driven along with the technology driven as they need to be hand in hand for success. This would lead to more successful stories of MDM in growth market countries like India.