Before attending webinars, reading vendor-sponsored white papers or attending conferences, you need to understand your goals.

While you get to clarity regarding these goals, someone in your company may already be taking vendor meetings - that’s fine. They may have even already given indications to one vendor that they are the preferred choice. Yes, these are distractions but, there will be plenty of opportunities to talk about vendors, technology and partnering. If they are modern or not; If the style is transactional or analytical; Will the software run on in-house servers or licensed as-a-service.

What everyone involved will (or should) be asking is, “What does the business need?”. If anyone at your company is seeking answers to this question, it is you, the Owner. You’ll need to understand enough about the future direction for your company and the capabilities required to fulfill them. Be particularly aggressive at understanding what is needed right now, what are the gaps the business has – what matters to them.

If your company already has the answers to the questions about what it needs from a master or customer data capability, you need to know what these are and ensure they are written down. Why are these important, and to whom? If your company is typical, there are going to be a lot of unknowns. For example, it is not unusual for the data strategy to not be written down in any detail or at all. If it is not written down, you need to formalize it enough for yourself: (1) Write it down and (2) Get it validated with your champion. You don’t need to be the person to define the data strategy for the company, although you may have that in your scope as well. At a minimum, you, your champion and team need a shared understanding of the plan as the baseline for the MDM work.

Clarity above method.

Your organization likely has adopted a method or two that you will need to follow, such as requests for quotes, architecture standards or other processes and documentation. This guide is agnostic to these needs and methods.

Regardless of the method, clarifying and documenting what is needed is critical. If there is one recurring theme across my experience within hundreds of companies, it is that they struggle to understand the needs of the business. A clear understanding is more important than funding. Everyone involved should be seeking to understand how they contribute to the purpose. Vendors, architects, developers and testers will depend on you to clarify what actions they need to take or services they need to provide to deliver.

By having this clarity of mission, you will ensure that the MDM solution is providing the needed capabilities instead of what a vendor needs to sell or what the easiest option is to follow. I am not implying that all vendors are devious, or that developers are lazy. They each need someone to tell them what is required - that person is you.

You’ll want to understand the capabilities you need right away and in the known future. These should be in terms you know suit your company. The documentation or diagrams consumable by a general audience. There will be plenty of opportunities to map these to a specific solution or technology, first, you must understand the need.