Informatica MDM 360 Summit Paris
Opening by Steven Murphy, Senior VP & GM EMEA, Ben Rund, Senior Director Product Marketing – Information Quality Solutions, and Suresh Menon, Senior VP& GM Information Quality Solution
Stefan Hyttfors, advisor on Business Development in Network Sociey, opened the event with his inspiring presentation about the challenges of the future.
Dematerialization, Digitalization, Delocation – these challenges arrived our reality already. But the change will go on in an exponential speed. As leadership never survives a decade in businesses he recommends that we don’t need to be big anymore. We need to be fast. Otherwise anyone else comes up with a better idea for the solution of our customers’ problem.
What’s the future?
Amit Walia, Executive VP & Chief Product Officer at Informatica, introduced Data 3.0 to the community:
Business is data-driven – true. But it’s not about data as an outcome of what we do. Data combines all technical disruptions and becomes a disrupter itself. And the need for unifying the data, creating some Meta data, is bigger than ever before. The target has to be, to use data to understand the customer better in order to provide better experience.
Interesting insights offered Phyllis Imparo, Customer Strategy & Innovation at Merck Sharp & Dohme. Phyllis is running the MDM strategy globally for Merck and talked about how how Master Data supports the key initiatives in pharma industries.
Her learnings about implementing MDM are:
- You need to define very clearly what are your problems, your goals, the roles and responsibilities and align them to your business needs.
- Communicate early and often to all stakeholders, explain why it is necessary to care about data Quality and integrate a broad team of users, out of different businesses to your project team.
- Set up standards to achieve efficiency.
- Have a Sponsorship in the management of your company.
And most important of all: Know your organisation and remain agile.
Manouj Tahiliani, Senior Director Product Management at Informatica, and Ben Rund, Senior Director Product Marketing – Information Quality Solutions, showed the innovations in Information Quality Solutions.
Basic aim of all new functions is to help Informatica customers to bring products to the market faster, easier and more efficiently. As Ben Rund said: “Customer experience is nice. But it needs to be turned into revenue and growth.” Informatica is convinced that MDM is the foundation of data for creating value. It powers business, engagement, understanding as well as compliance.
Considering the actual trend for content marketing the new accelerator for reference data management was one of the highlights. It will help a lot of companies to optimize their marketing content quality.
Ron Matusof, VP MDM Customer Success & Advanced Customer Engineering, explained Best Practices to evaluate the trade-offs in information quality solutions and how to maximize value.
He pointed out the importance of clearly defined success criteria as well as to make sure, that they meet your real business outcomes. Business requirements should drive technology requirements, not the other way round.
As nothing is static, the continuous improvement of your success criteria as well as your data characteristics is an important accelerator for business success.
The afternoon satisfied with great customer stories in the Omnichannel track.
Michael Stolte, Director E-Commerce at Engelhorn, talked about how to combine tradition conscious with digital retailing. Although Engelhorn is a traditional local retailer, 25% of all sales are made online already.
Expectations are similar online and offline. This basic thought drives all online activities of Engelhorn. No one likes long checkouts or missing information – no matter if you are in a local shop or online.
Their PIM project started in 2012 when Engelhorn decided to leave their existing, completely individual programmed PIM-System, behind as it became too slow and inflexible. Therefor they decided to use standard software which enables Engelhorn to participate in technical innovation and offers the most possible flexibility.
According to Michael Stolte some of the keys to a successful PIM project are
1. Keep it simple for users
2. Help others to understand changes
3. Change your perspective
In the following Miikka Helin, Program Manager at KESKO provided some insights how they try offer the best Omnichannel Customer Experience.
Typical for a retailer, KESKO is facing the challenge of the increased ability of consumers to make analytical buying decisions. Offering digital services and selling an experience instead of just commodities became a key role for the company.
In 2014 Kesko started the implementation of Informatica MDM using a classical waterfall method. It quickly became apparent that things changed too fast and they switched to an agile project management in their second phase in order to stay flexible. Since 2016 Kesko is in a continuous developing mode with their MDM System.
Very impressive: 66% of the Finns hold a customer card of Kesko, 84% of total sales are loyalty sales. That shows the enormous potential of Big Data: Kesko knows quite good what Finns are doing.
Again the Informatica MDM 360 Summit provided useful insights and fascinating prospects for Informatica solutions. It was great to join it and we are looking forward to the next summit!