Data 4.0: A New 360-Degree Perspective With Master Data Management
We’ve been on an exponential path with data over the last decade. During Data 1.0, we used data to drive specific business applications and those applications managed master data. Data 2.0 saw data supporting enterprise-wide business processes and we used master data management (MDM) tools to ensure consistency of master data across applications. And in Data 3.0, MDM evolved from tools to master data management solutions that provide 360-degree views of individual MDM domains, such as Customer 360, Product 360, Supplier 360, Reference 360, and others.
Today, as we enter the world of Data 4.0, we see increasing demands for cross-organization context for data and decisions. Businesses embarking on Data 4.0 want to understand the relationships between different domains of master data, and to be able to link transaction and interaction data with master data to get a 360-degree view across their entire business. This approach enables depth of insight and offers a breadth of context that no individual domain can provide on its own. We call this enterprise perspective Business 360.
Why Business 360 Now
Modern organizations must deal with increasing complexity and a robust pace of change. They need to balance customer acquisition and retention, supply chain efficiency, and resiliency with maximum profitability and liquidity. But this can’t happen in isolation: you also need to understand the connections and inter-relationships across decisions and actions. If analysis and action is siloed, you risk optimizing one area of the business at the expense of other business priorities.
For example, if marketing looks only at the products that customers are buying through which channels to determine the type of personalized offer to send, they might recommend items that are out of stock. Not a great customer experience—and it could result in decreased loyalty, retention, and profitability. A truly informed marketing decision should also consider product availability, ability to deliver on time, and the overall financial impact.
The goal is to provide each area of the business with the data critical to support processes and users. A Business 360 strategy is one that creates trusted views of each data domain, connects the individual domains together, and then delivers unique perspectives of the data to various business functions and applications. Business 360 combines multiple domains and entities with additional intelligence, and packages it for each function, inside a 360 application to manage data for that function. Think of Business 360’s mantra as “make data contextual and useful for the business.”
Creating a Business 360
Data about customers, products, and suppliers resides in a variety of systems and sources, with varying levels of completeness and accuracy. Master data management capabilities help consolidate, cleanse, standardize, and enrich different domains of data. Machine learning capabilities can help infer the relationships between master, transaction, and interaction data. And graph capabilities help connect all the data points together to provide an even better understanding of the impact to the enterprise for any potential decision and actions.
Benefits of Business 360
Examples of the benefits of Business 360 include the following:
- Improved customer retention, loyalty, and profitability
- Optimized supply chain continuity, resiliency, and flexibility
- Increased product conversion rates, basket size, and profitability
- Accelerated financial consolidation and reporting
- Greater accuracy from forecasting, planning, and analysis
Future-Proofing Your Business
The scale, complexity, and importance of data will continue to grow as we move further into Data 4.0. A Business 360 holds the promise of improved customer experiences, optimized supply chains, enhanced digital commerce, and improved financial management through more contextual and meaningful data.
To do this, it is critical to connect the data across your enterprise into an end-to-end, 360-degree view of your business, and deliver subsets of data from multiple domains to people and applications in context of their specific activity or process. You need a trusted partner that can provide innovative technology and help you accelerate time to value, lower cost of ownership, increase return on investment, and reduce execution risk.
That’s us. Informatica.
Join us for Informatica LiveIntelligent Data Summit for Business 360 on CLAIREview. When youregister for CLAIREview, you’ll gain access to live series premieres throughout the summer as well as a host of on-demand sessions featuring analysts, customers and partners, technical experts, and more.
