About 5 years ago I made a statement that there was no such thing as IT strategy. What I meant was that there should be no such thing as a strategy purely for IT but instead it should be about how you solve business challenges and address the business strategy. In other words good "IT strategy" is actually an implementation roadmap to solve business challenges.
Now in the MDM world this is actually central to what we do as the things that really kill MDM projects are the failure to clearly understand the KPIs of the business and work with the business in delivering an MDM strategy which delivers against those KPIs.
So when looking at MDM strategy here at Capgemini we don't launch into product selections or technical discussions on "operational" v "analytical" MDM or on whether a "registry MDM" approach is sufficient but instead we look at a few key elements
- What information is in scope and what is its classification
- Who depends on that information and in what manner
- What are the key KPIs that the producers and consumers of the information have
Once you understand the business challenge and the opportunity you can then work on solving the problem via automation and simplification with technology but without that clarity you are going to be joining the 66% of MDM projects who fail to demonstrate value.
If you don't start with the business value in your strategy how can you hope for your implementation to demonstrate it?
