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MDM-Powered Apps can help you use your data in new ways

This week, I have the opportunity to speak at the TDWI Solution Summit in Savannah, GA. It’s a great event co-chaired by two outstanding people I have gotten to know over the past several years at Initiate – Jill Dyche and Phillip Russom.

My presentation this year is titled “The Future of MDM: MDM-Powered Applications.” The premise is not new or controversial: packaged applications are often built on bad data which render organizations’ most important business processes as inefficient and ineffective. And changing existing packaged applications is often not feasible.

What is new is that Initiate firmly believes the next generation of MDM will include business application front ends that provide data and information directly to the front line — business managers and decision makers — and deliver immediate value in terms of business data stewardship and real-time decision making.

Some of the different business areas within an organization that can benefit from MDM-Powered Applications and the types of applications managers can expect over the next few years include sales territory management, customer on-boarding, and MDM-powered Salesforce.com, to name just a few.

MDM can be used to both enhance existing applications and to enable new applications that could not be developed before MDM data (or trusted master data) was available. Data enhanced by MDM can be integrated into existing applications, via plug-ins or data services, or deployed as a new horizontal or vertical application that augments existing applications.

So, look for Initiate to not only deliver the underlying engine for MDM, but also to deliver targeted composite applications and a framework for building MDM-powered applications that our customers and partners can leverage.

This framework would allow production-quality user interface components to be integrated into existing applications, to enhance searching or relationship management capabilities, for example. Out-of-the-box solution mashups then can combine these components together into end-to-end business scenarios.

As I can see it, the only controversy with our approach might be with those wary of introducing yet more apps to people who might already have too many, or those who may be hesitant to give tools to customers that let them build workarounds and band-aids to larger data problems.

I understand that view, but at the end of the day it’s about solving customers’ problems. In many instances the applications customers have simply can’t solve their immediate business problems. Our approach is to allow companies to close gaps in existing applications by adding better data and services than they had before and to solve their problem today.

What are your thoughts?