At the 2005 Kalido User Group this week in London a survey was carried out of the attendees regarding the attendees persepctives on master data management. The striking result in the survey was that, although around two-thirds of the respondents (and these are serious companies, like BP, Unilever, Philips etc) felt that dealing with their companies master data was a “top three”priority issue for them, no less than 90% felt that the industry had failed to address it properly. While there are a few software products out there to help tackle customer data integration and product information management, very few address general issue of managing master data across a global corporation.
Large corporations are need to manage not just customers and products, but also other data such as brand, organization, people, price etc, which are scattered throughout a wide range of corporate systems, including multiple instances of ERP systems from the same vendor. The application consolidation that has been occurring in recent years has clearly failed to make inroads into this issue in the eyes of the people that matter: the customers.
