You must connect Data Management to the Essence of Your Business. That is the best way to get C-Level support and business stakeholder engagement. Your Data Management Story starts with discovering the essence of your business. Watch this Data Story Mini Clinic to discover yours.

The classic challenge is: You’ve got multiple departments and systems You've got different regions. You've got different go-to-markets. You've got data from third parties. Multiple systems and workflows create disparate data with different definitions that lack internal standards.

MDM can equal? PAIN! It does equal pain. I've been in the space long enough that I've learned people don't use those kind of nice business euphemisms like “we have a challenge” or “we have a hurdle” They talk about physical pain. I'm going to show you what pain looks like.

Master Data is a single source of common business data used across multiple systems, applications, and processes. It's the nouns of the business. Your customers, your vendors, your partners, your prospects, your brands, your services. The things you make, the people you buy from and sell to.

The Golden Rule of Data: What you put in is what you come out with. Master data feeds every type of enterprise system. As we say “rubbish in, rubbish out - garbage in, garbage out.” So do upon your data as you would have it do upon you.

How do we articulate this to the business? How do they understand what we do? Think about the 5 Pillars of Master Data In terms of managing it : Value. Value, Structure, Connectability, Coverage and Quality These aren't totally rank order but I'm going to end with quality because that's where most people start.

Digital transformation can mean a lot of things to a lot of people but one thing it means to everybody, every organization, is that you've got more data now than you ever had before and you need new ways to manage it, that you never thought of before, to do things you never imagined before.

If you can establish those 4Cs: code, company, category, country, a lot of data problems go away. You know where everything is. You know what kind of thing it is. You know who owns it. And you know it's unique.

When you're trying to codify a relationship, when you're trying to structure a relationship, we find that these 4Cs help simplify the process. Every entity, every record, every relationship needs to have these 4Cs: code, company, category, and country.

MDM stands for master data management. It's a type of software. The purpose of it is to create the Master Data content. MDM vs Master Data: These two things are inextricably linked but they are separate. every car needs gas, every kitchen needs food, all plumbing needs water.

Master data is the most important data. It is the data in charge. Master Data is your most important data. It is the data in charge. It's in charge of your business. It is the most important data any enterprise has, any organization has. Not everybody realizes it. Not everybody treats it that way.

Thoughts about the MASTER DATA and ways to help you think about it. It's a common language for the common relationship types across an Enterprise. Does everybody have the same understanding? It's about rows and columns. It's about truth and meaning. It's about making good decisions.

When you establish a relationship in an MDM process or in a Master Data process when you codify a relationship, we talk about these 4Cs : CODE, COMPANY, CATEGORY and COUNTRY.