Master Data and Enterprise Information Management, the 16th conference in Data Management series, collected MDM practitioners around the Europe to Berlin. Talent Base participated the conference as a Partner Sponsor during 25th-26th of April. As the conference headline Moving Towards Further Levels of MDM Maturity suggested, master data management has again taken more important role in companies’ business development agenda. In this post we summarize our views on the key take-aways from those two days.

1. KEY TAKE-AWAYS
marcus evans MDM Conference
Master Data and Enterprise Information
Management, Berlin
25th-26th of April 2016
Nino Ilveskero, Talent Base Oy

2. CONFERENCE THEME:
Moving Towards Further Levels of
MDM Maturity

3. TAKE-AWAY 1:
C-level support is here.

4. Master Data Management has again taken
more important role in companies’
business development agenda.

5. MDM is seen as
an important vehicle to boost different
types of change programs ranging
from business innovation to cost efficiency,
to safety and compliance.

6. As the support increases, so does the
pressure to deliver real business benefits.

7. “We are no more those guys at the end of
the corridor with whom no one wants to
talk.”
Roberto Maranca, GE Capital

8. MDM professionals need to speak a
language that business people understand.
Focus on what is relevant to them.

9. TAKE-AWAY 2:
Data as a source of business
innovation.

10. Good quality data can spark
business innovation.

11. “Developing new applications such as data
visualization of our international partner network
was easy, because the data management
process and data foundation was already laid
as part of our XRM project.”
Heikki Ilvessalo, Development Director,
Castrén & Snellman

12. Shell has found several ways to
improve their business
based on accurate data
e.g. on gas station properties.

13. THEME 3:
Data quality is a relative measure.

14. In some cases, aiming to 100% data
quality may not make any sense at all.

15. Instead of high quality,
think what is the right quality.

16. Data quality problems also have
a lifecycle and errors can be classified
based on their lifetime.

17. Recently occurred errors indicate that
there is a process problem which
creates them.

18. Errors which have been there for a
while (e.g. few months) indicate that
there is a cleansing problem.

19. THEME 4:
Communicate

20. MDM development is always
a change management project.

21. It requires extensive communication.
Forget acronyms and use the
language everybody understands.

22. Best people and practices to
successful MDM projects:
www.talentbase.fi