CMO Mastery of Master Data Management (MDM): Where Do You Begin?

Don't assume all your data inconsistencies will come out in the wash. Without an MDM program, your marketing will inevitably take a tumble

Step 1: Evaluate Your Data Situation

As I mentioned in my previous post, CMOs must embrace Master Data Management (MDM) to deliver meaningful ROI. MDM is not just another data solution you should contemplate using – it is the foundation for every marketing program you will execute. It therefore MUST be employed. MDM is specifically designed to work across all of your enterprise systems – pulling together data from individual applications across departments including everything from social and Web data and even crucial third-party sources. And, with the number of data sources growing every day, so will the complexity of being able to make sense of all of the data. That’s why MDM is so important. MDM is your only hope for getting a 360-degree view of your customers and insight into every aspect of your business.

As you can tell, I’m huge proponent of MDM and hopefully after reading this series, you will be as well. So let’s explore the first step to take when jumping into an MDM strategy.

Find Your Data Owner

No matter how big or small your team may be, it is important to know you are not in this alone. Building the foundation for MDM requires collaboration and communication from multiple teams, beginning with the executive in charge of data management and governance. More recently, this may be under the dominion of the Chief Data Officer; many companies are beginning to appoint CDOs to champion data and analytics across the organization. Don’t have a CDO? Don’t worry, your organization likely has someone in IT or another department that is in charge of the data strategy across the organization. Get to know this colleague very well, because they will become the key partner in your journey to developing and implementing a successful MDM strategy.

Define the Data

It is important to get on the same page with your counterparts around how you define and collect data. Your definition of a “customer” and “prospect” may not always be the same. Be ready to discuss what this means to your department so it can be made universal across the many data silos in the enterprise. At a time when marketers need to manage and understand their business on a holistic basis in order to grow, there is a lack of enterprise-wide reference standards for data recording and management.

Without the benefit of common master data, your data leaders may have created business management systems with their own data management definitions or be working from definitions supplied to them to meet specific departmental business management criteria. A system, for example, may not have incorporated governance controls to reduce duplication of records based on inconstant naming conventions. As a result, the information and data output of these systems may render rich details but cannot accurately summarize campaign activity, even for a single advertiser client or media vehicle. All departments and divisions need to agree on hierarchies of customers and products and how to resolve duplicate records.

Map it Out

Next, work with the CDO (or the aforementioned data steward) to identify all the stakeholders who need to use the data and understand how they will use it to enhance the customer experience (which the CMO often ultimately owns). Data is the underlying connection among all the interactions across your company that make up the customer’s experience, so this is crucial.

Given this, a CMO and the data leader must map all the existing incoming and outgoing sources of data whether from internal systems, digital/social, or from third parties. Just understanding the totality of what you are dealing with provides enlightenment for driving the customer experience strategy. In this process, you may find key missing data streams that you need to get from third-party sources or discover data gems that have been hidden in the corners of the enterprise or a random app within the enterprise that can propel your marketing strategy forward.

At this point, you have hopefully gathered a deeper understanding of your current data situation. This is just the first step toward getting a single version of the truth from your data. In future posts, I will discuss how you analyze this situation to continue build your MDM strategy.

This article originally appeared on Dun & Bradstreet's Connectors blog.

Image credit: Ryan McGuire