Baseline partner Jill Dyche recently returned from her role as co-chair of TDWI’s MDM Insight conference in Savannah, Georgia – the first conference of its kind. We checked in with Jill to get her thoughts on the conference, the speakers, and the attendees.

INSIGHT: Jill, how was the MDM Insight conference different than other MDM events and conferences you’ve attended?

Jill Dyche: Well, I think one big deal about MDM Insight is that it was invitation-only. The two organizations that hosted the event, The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) and PPM Media created a model where they very carefully qualified people who applied to attend. If you met the criteria, one of which was that you had not yet chosen a Master Data Management (MDM) solution for your company, then you got to attend the conference for free – all expenses paid. So, these attendees had all done their MDM research. They were ready to get in the game—but most weren’t sure exactly how to get off the sidelines!

Another differentiator with this conference was its size. TDWI and PPM Media kept the attendance very limited, capping it at 100 before expanding it to 120 to meet the demand. But even with 120 attendees, the conference had an extremely intimate and familial setting. The organizers did an excellent job of mixing keynote presentations with break-out sessions for particular groups.

The last differentiator that comes to mind is the speakers  As a co-chair of the event, I was in charge of finding the best practice leaders to come and speak. Our priority was to find people who had walked the MDM walk but nevertheless had not been on “the circuit.” These were not only Baseline Consulting clients whom we’d worked with on their MDM implementations, but also companies we’d talked to and advised at different stages of their MDM journeys. Companies we knew had great stories to tell around MDM delivery and – ultimately – success. These fresh voices really portrayed a new level of MDM maturity in the marketplace that we hadn’t really seen before.

INSIGHT: Those are some powerful differentiators. Was there anything else about the conference you hadn’t seen elsewhere?

JD: Well since we’re raving about the speakers I’d add that the conference made the speakers available to the attendees for one-on-one sessions, something that could only really work because of the size and quality of the event. Attendees were able to go online and schedule time with the speakers. This added to the intimate feeling of the event. If you keyed in on something that one of the speakers discussed, you could very easily book some one-on-one time to explore the topic or ask further questions.

INSIGHT: Within this group of fresh voices, did you see some common ground? A common experience?

JD: The speakers were all early adopters, and they shared the common challenge of finding a solution that didn’t already exist in their companies. We had companies like Proctor and Gamble who probably have every technology on the market, but who nevertheless needed to acquire a separate, purpose-built MDM solution to solve their business problems.

INSIGHT: What about the speakers do you think resonated the most with the attendees?

JD: The speakers were confronting business problems, not just technology problems. To the uneducated, MDM looks a lot like infrastructure. But when you listen to a speaker like Barry Briggs, a CTO at Microsoft, describe his company’s challenges with business hierarchy management, you get to see how they’ve deployed successful solutions for managing various business relationships across very complex business customer hierarchies. Barry did a fantastic job of describing exactly what those capabilities deliver to Microsoft from a business perspective.

On that same note, Cathy Burrows from Royal Bank of Canada, described the power of MDM from a CRM standpoint, where an RBC customer can do business with the bank through many different channels, across many different lines of business. Cathy has come from a subsidiary bank at RBC over to the insurance side, and there are a tremendous number of common customers across those lines of business. This is actually representative of a lot of the MDM business cases we’re seeing today. A customer may have many relationships with a bank, or across sales channels with a retailer, or across telco products lines. Companies need the underlying support system in order to not only identify those common customers but to understand their depth and breadth. I think what many attendees got from these speakers was a way of looking at the business value of MDM.

INSIGHT: Speaking of the attendees, you mentioned that this was a very qualified group of individuals. Did you see any commonalities within this group? Did they all have similar concerns?

JD: As diverse as they were across companies and industries, there were some very common issues faced by the group. For example, we had one representative of a company what was acquiring 10-12 new subsidiaries every year. Not having MDM in place was creating a major time/cost expense as they tried to get each new subsidiary’s data on board. They understood that MDM has a promise of facilitating the on-boarding of new data from new companies. That was a business problem shared by several attendees. 

Beyond that, a lot of companies represented were struggling with how to improve the data they were using for analytics. A handful of attendees were in charge of their respective Business Intelligence (BI) programs, and they were looking for ways in which MDM could enrich that environment.

A third common group was the IT Decision Makers. They were looking at MDM from a data quality perspective, searching for that one-stop shop for data cleansing and reconciliation. While the other two had business problems, this group was looking to ease the pain of data integration.

INSIGHT: Do you think these three groups were able to get what they needed from the event?

JD: After the keynote presentations each day, it was very fulfilling to watch as we broke out into groups—shout out to Group 1! [Jill laughs]—and  each group was able to share common experiences and problems, including how they built business cases, how they pitched MDM to their executives, and which vendors they had spoken with as they evaluated MDM solutions. Group members got very tight with one another—forming little communities for sharing their experiences.
 
INSIGHT: Besides the information sharing, what else happened in the groups?

The vendor sponsors also gave presentations to the groups, but in this setting the vendors actually provided case studies rather than a standard slideware sales pitch. This was very valuable for people to hear these success stories. Attendees benefited from hearing from various vendors, but in a format that pertained much more to their own business.

There was also a wide variety of vendor sponsors, which was very helpful for the groups. Attendees got to see now only how the large enterprise players like SAP or Oracle tackled the MDM challenge, but they also got to see the specialty and purpose-built solutions, like Kalido and Initiate.

INSIGHT: Didn’t some vendors receive awards for their presentations?

JD: All of the vendor sponsors did a great job of telling stories/case studies, but the attendees also voted on the best presentations by vendors. Exeros and Siperian were voted the Best Presenters because the case studies they presented resonated extremely well with the attendees. Both featured actual customer speakers to tell their stories. Siperian’s customer, Pfizer, discussed the global challenges for MDM, and Exeros brought in an executive from Bank of America, who talked about how she used Exeros’ technology to reconcile information from multiple data sources. Being able to hear from an actual customer about how the technology had added value to her company was very exciting for the attendees.

INSIGHT: What do you think the attendees took away from the conference? Any thoughts as to what people’s lists of “next steps” will be after attending MDM Insight?

JD: One of the things we heard from nearly everyone they were either in the process of or about to create a business case for MDM. Beyond that, I suspect that the vendor conversations will now begin in earnest for this group of people. They’re so much better educated now. Not just from last year, but from when they arrived. The readiness factor is much higher now, and the attendees are all primed to get started. And hopefully, by next year we’ll see some of these guys as new case studies!

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