Traditional Master Data Management (MDM) and governance initiatives segment data into readily defined domains, or buckets, around concepts such as customer, product, employee, or otherwise. Although these initiatives often provide some value on their own, the intersection of these domains by contextualizing data is where significant value is added. Contextualizing data combines real-time transactional data with master data. TIBCO Founder and CEO Vivek Ranadivé’s best-selling book, “The Two-Second Advantage,” highlights this by stating that “A little bit of the right information just a little beforehand—whether it is a couple of seconds, minutes, or hours—is more valuable than all of the information in the world six months after the fact.” How is this achieved exactly?
Single vs. Multi Domain MDM
Most MDM initiatives focus on an approach that addresses a specific requirement, such as offering a 360-degree customer view, or enabling product information management. These initiatives can be thought of as singular or legacy MDM, since they only address one data domain operating in isolation. This approach is limiting in that these systems often have little or no integration with each other (even when they are sourced from the same vendor). Thus, analyzing relationships between entities becomes time-consuming and cost-prohibitive, leaving a lot of MDM benefits on the table. For example, how do you know which customers own which products? Or which products have a low adoption rate, segmented by geography?
By leveraging a multi-domain MDM approach, where all data domains are managed by the same system (in this case product and customer), the value of intersecting data and relationships can be modeled and managed therein. It’s no wonder that TIBCO MDM, which is multi-domain by design, is positioned by Gartner as a leader for master data management in the MDM Magic Quadrants for both customer and product.
Energizing Master Data with Context
The next step to exponential MDM benefits from data is to merge real-time transactional data with governed master data. Doing this requires a robust integration foundation that captures events in real time, such as customer location, inventory availability, and so on. TIBCO’s foundation and decades of experience in messaging and integration provide the underlying infrastructure that does just this: As transactional data flows across the TIBCO messaging bus (leveraging an event-driven architecture approach) for consumption by other systems, this same information can be correlated with master data in real time and in memory.
Once context is established around data, the next step is to apply rules or algorithms to the data to capture opportunities, or to detect threats and act on them with TIBCO BusinessEvents. For example, if a customer clicks on a website (an event collected by the messaging infrastructure), this information can be enriched by the customer profile from master data, along with real-time inventory data to make a tailored offer to a customer—all in real time. Therefore, a simple click on a website becomes an opportunity to act, thereby energizing your data.
Explore the Gartner MQ on Master Data Management for both Product and Customer.
