Tag: Digital

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Shaping technical requirements for your customer MDM

person sitting on sofa using laptop

Assuming you have settled on a cloud-based customer MDM, you’ll need to consider a couple of key traits that the technical solution should or could have to meet the present and future needs of your business.

Pretectum considers the following five essential traits to be important from a technical standpoint and with these in mind, the Pretectum CMDM is constructed accordingly using the latest available cloud infrastructure.

Secure – clients connect to the platform using credentials that are tied to their organization’s identity. Accordingly, we don’t use user IDs we use email addresses. Users have to have been established by a domain administrator or invited to participate. Credentials are verified using the latest in verification methods are the details are stored securely in the internals of the system. Users can be deactivated by the administrator and even deleted. Users can also be more securely identified using Multifactor Authentication (MFA)

Schema models and data are stored in the system in a secure and encrypted manner and is only visible to the administrator of the system and users based on a permissions model. Even Pretectum support personnel cannot see the data you store plainly even though they have access to the back-end internals of the system.

Data objects within the system are made available to other users of the system within the same domain on a least-privilege basis. This means that even if you can log into the system you may not have permission to even view something let alone edit, delete or download it.

Compartmentalized – within the domain definition, the administrator is able to establish multiple logical business areas to assist users in having access to just the right amount of functionality and objects that they need to achieve their objectives. So apart from the domain, you also have a business area.

A user has to curate their schema models and ultimately their data sets in the context of the business area and these objects have to be tied to a business area. Other users of the system only have access to objects in the business area if they are members of that business area and their abilities in that business area are tied to the permissions they have been granted to that business area even if they have more powerful role assignments.

Collaborative – at the core of any MDM there is expected to be some degree of co-creation and co-curation of customer master data. Accordingly, the Pretectum CMDM supports a basic collaboration decision workflow model for the creation of objects within the system. This is configurable on the fly as well as through some basic rules and all decisions are stored securely in an audit logic that can be used for decision reviews and auditing.

Connected – a customer master data management system that operates in a vacuum is less valuable than a master data management system that is hyperconnected. The Pretectum CMDM supports the most popular connectivity options for working with your cloud-based and cloud-exposed systems and data repositories

Scalable & Reliable – it goes without saying that any hub and spoke implementation of a customer MDM needs to always be operational and dependable.

The Pretectum CMDM is architected and deployed on the latest cloud infrastructure in data centres that are world-class and servicing the world. You can be confident that the customer master is available when you need it and where you need it and will perform as well in terms of throughput as similar systems deployed on-premise.

Contact us to learn more about how you can benefit from the Pretectum CMDM advantage.

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Customer Master Data and Digital Transformation

Quartz LCD digital 'transformer' child's wristwatch (wrist-watch; Quartz LCD digital)

Digital Transformation is very popular as a goal currently. Exactly what it is though, can be confusing and ambiguous. Digital transformation is a catch-all term that squarely lands in the world of sales and marketing buzzword bingo.

The scope of issues, functions, technologies and efforts around digital transformation are vague, and the term seems to mean something different for every organization. One thing that is pervasive though, is the message. A message that embraces the idea that your business should be digitising as much of its data and activities as practically possible.

For customer master data management there is a high interdependency between a digital transformation strategy and customer data management.

The ability to have a solid basis for the customer master is a critical part of any digital transformation strategy.

How you execute on customer master data management as a part of digital transformation is the critical piece of the puzzle that holds the potential for maximal organizational value.

What is digital transformation exactly?

As mentioned, the term “digital transformation” can mean anything and everything depending on who is pronouncing it and who the audience is. It can encompass tools, technology, business processes, customer experience, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, and accompany every other contemporary buzzword that marketers and promoters can come up with.

The ‘semi-official’ definitions from industry analysts and technology vendors include digitizing manual processes and records, modernizing the IT function or moving to cloud technologies, putting services online and accessible outside of the corporate network; developing new business models and taking a “digital-first” approach. This last piece is important, because when we consider it in relation to the creation and maintenance of customer records and record-keeping that may mean creating new business processes and overhauling or devising new customer experiences and ways for your business to engage with customers.

Digital transformations tend to be expensive, broad swathe and highly strategic with the impact expected to be felt in many areas of the business. Bricks and mortar businesses moving a fair portion of their business strategy to online, for example, might be considered a critical element of a digital transformation strategy,

The end-to-end customer experience may see transformations in every aspect of the customer engagement model from campaign construction, through lead accumulation, lead nurture, identify, contact, needs assessment, qualification, opportunity establishment, proposal, quote, order, bill, fulfil, collect and support. A great deal of technology-based solutions may be involved along the way and many systems. These may include CDPs, CRMs, ERPs, back-office technologies, aggregation services and a host of configurable technologies that support business processes. The goal, in the end, is to reduce the amount of friction associated with contracting with customers. The challenge is the complexity of the whole end-to-end process and the level of effort and solutions required to achieve the end goal.

Some digital transformation initiatives will attempt to boil the ocean in the pursuit of a friction-free engagement model, others will be more incremental, progressive and pragmatic. One trait that any customer-related digital transformation initiative will fail or succeed in, is the quality of the customer master data management process. Though a high degree of data curation with quality at the customer master level, cannot guarantee success, it is almost certainly true that light curation accompanied by potentially low-quality data will almost certainly lead to failure to meet the goals of the program.

Customer master data management is foundational and often not directly tied to an ROI. Identifying intermediate wins from improved data quality and more comprehensively or flexible data curation can be evaluated in the context of OKRs. These, in turn, can be leading indicators that can feed into desired outcomes which in turn will fuel ROI measures.

To learn about the Pretectum approach to Customer Master Data Management and work out whether you can take advantage, why not contact us?

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Customer Master Data Management Wake Up Call

black ring bell alarm clock

There is an increased focus on all things digital and one of the characteristics of these programs is an increased focus on data governance. Some companies are discovering quite late in the game that the lack of a coherent and centralized master data management program is slowing down their digitalization initiatives.

Historically, MDM projects have been big and expensive and principally only undertaken by global brands and organizations with deep pockets. One of the characteristics of embarking on such programs is that they typically require a large investment, the most senior leadership’s sponsorship and they’re often software-driven. Pretectum’s view is that this is the first problem area and the piece of the solution that holds the greatest risk.

Implementing Master Data Management as a sub-discipline of data governance cannot be considered in the context of simply another piece of software. Any investment in process influencing technology today needs to focus on the business value, drivers.

Contemporary MDM solutions are often additive and cloud-based. They don’t suffer the encumbrance of the CRM, ERP or CDP system. What this really means, is that your business can implement such a system without negatively influencing your existing systems but at the very least jump-starting your knowledge of, and insights into your customer master data.

From an early stage implementation or even a proof of concept, you start to gain insights that can demonstrate immediate business value for any and all systems and processes. As you continue to explore functionality and integration you start to derive additional understanding about the data collection, curation and management processes that you have and the mechanisms that Pretectum feels constitute best-in-class master data management practice.

This approach helps teams and business units to get familiar with key concepts of data governance and Master Data Management in particular. Rather than wholesale “rip and replace” approaches which are both risky and traumatic, the approach to implementing a customer master data management hub for all your systems, can be gradual and layered, adding controls and functionality in a progressive way.

The business of MDM

By tackling master data management as a strategic business project instead of a tactical IT project your business has the strongest chance of a successful implementation, with Pretectum you will be leveraging a cloud based platform that supports multiple business areas, multiple users and multiple ways of looking at the customer. The pay-as-you go model of a Pretectum subscription allows you to grow your platform footprint as you expand your use .

You’ll start your implementation with a basic signup which allows you to define the number of users, the number of business areas and the peak of your anticipated data sets and data records. Accelerators at various stages allow you to fast track your implementation or you can go the more hand-crafted route where you manually define the characteristics of the data you wish to manage. You pay for a term subscription with no additional costs unless you explicitly request the addition of more capacity, users or features.

Implementation can take as little time as a few days from organization definition through schema definition and then you’re ready to start loading data in bulk or singly. If you wish to hook the C-MDM up to your other systems of record that can typically be achieved in the same day unless you have some exotic connection needs.

Pretectum’s C-MDM is there for the basic and most advanced of organizations, irrespective of where you are on the Master Data Management maturity ladder you will quickly be able to start gaining beneit from centralized management and governance of your customer master.