While businesses in all industries transition into their digital future, master data takes on increasing importance as the enabler of innovation and efficiency. Challenges are significant in that Master Data Management requires enterprises to meld new business strategies with ever-evolving IT capabilities to interlock IT and business goals.
After 13 years, the industry has come a long way. First known as the Customer Data Integration (CDI) Institute, the MDM & Data Governance Summit has helped lead thousands of people and their organizations on a journey to unify and manage data by providing the requisite insight and best practices needed to improve the use of top software and data management solutions.
I was looking forward to this conference for a number of reasons. I’ve been attending since 2007, often as a vendor from previous employers like Siperian (acquired by Informatica) and Initiate Systems (acquired by IBM). This summit was going to be a little different. I was presenting with my customer, Axia Women’s Health. A big thank you to my co-speaker, Dave Bonewicz, who did a great job sharing their journey to improve patient matching and interoperability and unify their patient data by deploying the Verato Universal MPI alongside eClinicalWorks in under 6 weeks. Along the way, they cleaned up huge volumes of duplicate medical records and successfully neutralized their manual work queue to levels not seen in years. Dave has put Axia in a great spot to grow and Verato is excited to be part of their journey.
Aaron Zornes is the Chief Research Officer with the MDM Institute and the conference chairman. As the event’s founder and top research officer, he is noted as speaker and author on enterprise IT issues and is the most quoted analyst on the topic of MDM. I have always enjoyed his candid remarks and review of the vendor and consulting community that support this important solution. He doesn’t hold back, and I’ve always enjoyed his candor.
I was expecting to hear a lot about GDPR or the recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”). Instead we heard about the need to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). The future of MDM continues to push the boundaries of an ever-advancing stack of capabilities that are not core to MDM’s purpose. Finding where your master data lives via deep learning neural networks seems to take us even further from the basic premise of what MDM tools are intended for: matching and linking consumer data. Rather then add complexity or cost, as an industry we should make sure we get this foundation right first, with revolutionary new technologies like Referential Matching that are more accurate and make MDM easier to deploy and more affordable to own.
As this conference rolls into its 14th year, I have high expectations for what the future holds for our industry. If you haven’t attended in the past, consider this show in your 2019 plans. Or, reach out to me to see how Verato can help you and perhaps we will be speaking together next November.