Presentations at the MDM Summit conference this week in New York featured some unlikely success stories. Speakers described how the hardest part of MDM was getting the business to buy in. Audience members asked questions about how to explain technical topics to their business constituents. Several vendors presented functions and features lists. (The savvy ones didn't talk about their products at all, but about how their solutions have driven change for their customers.) One speaker claimed that her company's MDM effort "started with the organization."

This only proves my point that MDM's success is often directly tied to a company's specific definition of what it should be. Companies should know the problem(s) they're solving before they acquire MDM. I served on the keynote panel with Aaron Zornes and Dan Power on Sunday night. "Don't go into the light!" I counseled an audience member when she asked if her company could retrofit its data warehouse into an MDM hub.

Maybe you consider MDM as reference data standardization. Perhaps you're captivated by the power of fast matching and linking. Maybe your MDM solution resolves the identities of an individual. Maybe it ensures that data is reconciled and corrected at the system of origin. Or maybe it serves as a "service" to disparate applications seeking a single version of truth about customers or products. However you use MDM, there's no template for it. But the hard, customized, culture-shaped work--as we heard in New York--is starting to drive change.

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