Had an interesting discussion at a conference recently where folk were trying to understand the differences between the various guises of consolidated customer information - despite these things being around many years, there's still confusion around when to consider either MDM, SCV, 360 or a more recently used term - 'holistic view'.
A reasonable argument was that MDM really only covered a core set of attributes and is fairly limiting in terms of data coverage where as the others are attempting to join up a far wider set of data for multiple use cases. This is true but I would like to expand on that with the following points and welcome any other inputs to drive home the messaging around this please. So here are my points:
- MDM coupled with data governance is really a discipline that acts as a starting point in ensuring data domains (like customer, product, location) are properly managed to give an ongoing reliable consolidated and unique reference to entities
- MDM looks at the data architecture and determines the real master sources - sometimes a complex organistion may have various systems of record each servicing different business use cases but can conflict. MDM policies, best practice and procedures ensure the ultimate master is clearly defined and manages data flow accordingly. For this MDM and DG come together
- SCV, 360 or holistic view HAS to start with a trustworthy core set of attributes (often the same or similar to those defined for MDM) becuase without this, there is a high risk of the wrong data being linked together
- When we have ascertained that the core attributes are 'golden' and reliably maintained, then we can start to address the needs of the business and then things start to get really interesting:
- SCV means different things to different departmental functions. We do have the option to expand out the first attempt at a SCV but often we end up with multiple variances of SCV's
- 360 view is a bit confusing but is an attempt to provide multiple views in one place - as is the holistic view - I like this scenario: a bank application (or member of staff using a UI) needs to see all relevant information for a customer for the uses case - but at the same time the customer also needs to see all the banks references about themselves e.g. SCV for GDPR
- In business terms we shouldnt worry about these multiple views, but in the IT world we have historically had a problem - why? because joining up data for multiple views is complex and can put at risk the performance of applications - why? because traditionally the repositories holding the data are either flat files, relational or hierarchical databases and we are very constrained by the physical models, uses of indexes etc that are deployed
- The good news is the IT industry now has the answer using Graph based technology. It's been around a few years now but companies are just starting to cotton on to its power and flexibility. Couple this with more refined ways to do entity resolution - we have a winner! These are exciting times for IT, we can finally offer the business what they have been asking for for years! MDM - tick; SCV (multiple views) - tick, 360 - tick; holistic view - tick :)
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Ian Godfrey
Knowledge Community Shared Account
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