The Inovis Blog

Our friend Andrew White at Gartner has been busy. He’s published two reports that are worth a read if you are a Gartner customer. First on Role of Metadata in Master Data Management and the other on Four dimensions of MDM.

A primer: Master Data Management - What is it?: Any company has multiple databases of information. A CRM system for sales & marketing customer data, a support system with support related customer data, an ERP system with customer order data etc. Also see Wikipedia for a detailed explanation.

The goal: Merge all the disparate, oft-conflicting records you have on customers and transactions into one authenticated master file.

To make an analogy. I have a facebook profile, a linkedin profile, a Pownce profile and a Twitter profile. I have friends in all of them. Besides this I have my friends who dont use these services in my Outlook. Would it not be great to have a system that will allow my to integrate all these and keep them de-duplicated and consistent so I know one true picture of all my friends, my interactions etc? That’s what apparently OpenID does for you, but Master Data Management would keep all these databases synchronized.

There is a good book on this topic by Alex. See below. Not worth buying in my opinion, but if you get a chance to swap it for another book in your library do it.

Yesterday was a learning experience for me. After writing a post about the benefits of outsourcing (that I confess named some of Inovis’ solutions and why I recommended them), a reader by the name of Mike Smith expressed that he found posts to seem like a sales pitch rather than a piece intended to inform. It was good to get this feedback. Before hearing Mike’s view, I had thought my work was getting customers better acquainted with the company and everything Inovis does. Once I read Mike’s comment, I immediately saw (and heard) what he was saying.

I am fairly new to the business world, and thought I ought to educate myself about the best ways to optimize customer feedback. I found a great blog by IdeaScope all about customer feedback and its importance. According to their website, IdeaScope is a “hosted customer feedback solution that helps you capture, monitor, and prioritize stakeholder feedback.” Who could possibly give me better advice than a company that specializes in listening to customers? So, I read some great articles and started to form a plan.

What does this have to do with the question of the week? I want to make this blog worthwhile and helpful to everyone in the industry and anyone else who may be interested in this blog. I want to know how to make this happen. What topics would you like to see covered on this blog? What changes would you recommend? How can we make this blog more meaningful to you? I’m all ears.