Without the support of senior management, it is tough to execute any enterprise initiative. Managers at a senior level are motivated to show some sort of positive contribution to organizational success and attainment of business objectives.
Senior management sponsorship plays a special role in nudging the rest of the organization to engage and align on any initiative. This strategic viewpoint can be thought of as having a long-term intention to transform and migrate the business from one state to the next as opposed to some short-term tactical activity.
Executives are best placed to prepare any given organization for the behavior changes that may be required as the adoption of a data governance initiative evolves. Personnel will start to focus on organizational success instead of the more limited and siloed divisionally or business area success.
Adopting data governance principles and implementing a master data program with or without technology aids, is expected to provide an organization with abilities that support adaptation and responsiveness to a changing organizational environment. Any DG initiative is also often undertaken to make data handling and management in general, more predictable and reliable.
It goes without saying then, that senior management’s support and endorsement of any customer master data management initiative is key to its success.
Keeping the customer front and center
Customers don’t really much care about the mechanics of how a business collects, handles, and uses their data unless they feel it is being handled recklessly or carelessly, or even annoyingly. Additionally, they may feel that if they have provided a great deal of data at least once, and it hasn’t changed, why isn’t it being leveraged for a better experience? Here you can think about the notion of personalization of interactions.
Of course, there are also regulatory issues here also. These may be international, national, regional, or even industry-specific. These regulatory strictures may even be mandated and not optional. Credit card handlers need to subscribe to the payment card industry (PCI) requirements of how payment card data is stored and protected from misuse. Consumers, in particular, don’t need to know that PCI compliance is a “thing” but they do expect their payment card data to be secured from prying eyes and stored in an encrypted fashion.
Being judicious about what is collected from consumers, and how it is stored, maintained, and used can lead to a variety of outcomes for consumers. These can be negative when the handling and use are poor and can delight when it is used in creative, beneficial, and non-creepy intrusive ways. Keeping an eye on the ultimate goal of customer loyalty and retention is key here. The data is simply data, but the quality, extent, and appropriate use of it are critical.
When gathering customer data for the CMDM it is important to make the customer aware of why you’re collecting that data, what you intend to use it for and how you ultimately plan to maintain or eventually retire it. Certain technologies like the Pretectum CMDM can help with continuous maintenance and of course, support methodical retirement using criteria-based approaches.
The ‘others’
No consideration for Customer Master Data Management would be complete if other stakeholders are not considered, namely those who manage the various organizational applications, business analysts, developers, internal organizational users and so on.
Customer data touches a great many areas of the business from sales and marketing to logistics, service, support and accounting. In fact, any application that involves the use of customer data may need to be modified to adjust to the use of customer master data management instead of local versions or replicas.
This means that the way you configure use and integration of the customer master must be carefully socialized with all application owners. This is especially true if you’re switching from automous siloed use to centralized CMDM, each application owner will have their own views on who should or could do what in the context of CMDM.
Just as with business owners, application owners will be concerned about data consistency and assurances of predictable behaviour within the context of their business application. The idea that CMDM is centrally managed might put application consistency and predictability at risk and one of the alternative approaches may need to be considered.
Application owners should therefore be considered as key stakeholders, success of a switch to CMDM becomes heavily dependent on application owner endorsement. When considering CMDM adoption, a great deal of time and effort will need to be invested in considering all the implications of the CMDM relative to the application for which they are responsible. This effort will also look at integration and the overall architectural dependencies that often flow from shifting the source of truth from specific applications to something centralized.
If your organization has a data governance group, they will be tasked with considering the CMDM in the context of non functional areas of doing business. Some will be focused on compliance and regulatory reporting and others will be focused on data consistency and compliance. These groups often rise-up from the absence of a coherent data management practice in the beginning or the recognition that relying on applications to manage the data is not sufficient because things still need to be monitored, configured and reported. A sound approach to CMDM will have these objectives baked into not just the process but also the technology. This is why, with the Pretectum CMDM we start with the definition of the organizations, roles and responsibilties and then layer in the schema definition with rule building. This is also why we monitor and track all changes as they occur through the data lifecycle.
To learn how Pretectum’s CMDM can help your organization with its customer master data management journey contact us today.