Should Wall Street Care About Your Master Data Management Strategy?

In this series of posts I will explore how master data management (MDM), a topic traditionally thought of as a matter of interest only to CIOs and IT Directors, can have a big impact on a company’s bottom line, both positive and negative. 

As such, CEOs, CFOs, and other executives on the business side are increasingly involving themselves in MDM projects.

The simple fact is that most executives are completely oblivious to the data issues that are eroding the value of their organizations, which is in total contrast to their being up-to-date on most financial issues.

Both are critical corporate assets with utmost visibility to both customers and shareholders, so why the gap?

This steady erosion of an organization’s credibility among customers and suppliers, as well as its inability to leverage business intelligence investments and make sound decisions based on accurate information is a primary causal factor in market share loss.

MDM should be contextualized and actively leveraged in an analytics framework to drive business value. In addition to providing the baseline for efficient planning and execution, MDM has the capability to power a company’s BI engine by providing a network wide view of business performance analyzed through the master entities of an organization.

MDM is a multi-party, multi-echelon, cross-functional, and process-oriented discipline affecting information about customers, products, suppliers, locations, etc.

In later posts I will explore in detail the connection between MDM and a company’s fiscal health….it’s significant enough that even financial analysts have started to take notice. In an example I’ll cover in greater detail later, a One Network customer that operationalized our cloud-based MDM strategy saw financial benefits translated into quarterly EPS results which beat Wall Street’s expectations by an order of magnitude!

About the Author

Greg Brady is CEO and founder of One Network Enterprises. Brady founded the company in 2002 and is a renowned supply chain and technology visionary. Before that, he led i2 Technologies to high growth and market leadership for seven years, both as CEO and head of worldwide operations. Previously, Brady was vice president of worldwide applications marketing for Oracle and held positions at J.D. Edwards and at McCormack and Dodge. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Indiana University.

Related: Master Data Management and the Hidden Costs of Customer Service