Seeing rapid, tangible ROI on business investments remains a constant pressure for enterprises in every industry. Defining how to measure investment success, like many other facets of business, boils down to a data problem. With a solid MDM foundation, accelerating ROI despite economic uncertainties can be a reality.
Karthik Narayan, director of product management at Reltio, and Anthony Colichio, senior value consultant at Reltio, joined DBTA’s latest webinar, Uncover and Accelerate the ROI of Master Data Management, to discuss various strategies for proving investment value with MDM while expediting time-to-value for analytics, operational, and AI initiatives.
Colichio contextualized the conversation by explaining that organizations are faced with the pressure of the rapid change of modern business as well as greater complexity across the board—which is further compounded by the proliferation of unclean, incomplete data. Without a proper, robust data foundation in place, any initiative will fail to prove value. Yet, simultaneously, the emphasis on ROI draws attention away from improving data quality.
“Every successful initiative starts with trusted data, and sometimes that gets lost around the rest of the organization,” said Colicchio. “Although better core data is intuitively valued, more than ever—with interest rates high, with cost of labor high—there is an increased pressure for speed-to-value. Success planning really matters—quantifying success has really become the focus of lots of organizations as they look to deliver value back to their customers and investors.”
The very pressure of ROI velocity highlights a skills gap between understanding and implementing an investment and calculating its value, according to Colichio. Closing that gap requires a thorough examination of the investment lifecycle.
Many rely on the parts of investment that are comfortable; the hard, tangible aspects of data and governance requirements. But more conceptual, abstract ideas—such as business outcomes, metrics and KPIs, and business process and application improvements—are left to figure out in the amorphous future.
Colichio suggested that by incorporating and documenting business outcomes in the beginning of the investment process, it provides clarity as to the amount of value it delivers later. It is important, then, to understand the different types of goals and KPIs available, and then align that with investment execution, to quantify value. Some examples are:
- CEO Goals: Increase revenue, reduce cost, mitigate risk
- Business Outcomes: Using concrete quantities, increase dollar retention rates (by, for example, ~1-3% over 2H24 in SFDC) or decrease fully-loaded data stewardship costs (to less than 34% by 2025)
- Engagement/Technical: Data error rates, profile completion rates, API performance
Once the goal is thoroughly defined, with tools like Reltio’s online ROI calculator, businesses can map out what an investment might look like at a high level, and how it can be properly executed to drive value.
Narayan transitioned into discussing how the Reltio platform—the scalable data unification and multidomain MDM platform for accelerating time-to-value—can help deliver and demonstrate a clear ROI increase. Part of this is through the ability to perform continuous, rapid iterations on investments to ensure that business needs are attended to.
This is achieved through velocity packs, or pre-packaged configurations of everything in the platform, but tailored to a customer’s industry, often defined by industry best practices and standards. Offering prescriptive implementation with predefined assets, Reltio’s velocity packs enable 2-, 6-, and 10- week value milestones to guide enterprises through their ROI acceleration journeys. Ultimately, velocity packs deliver:
- Accelerated deployment with out-of-the box data model, match rules, and configurations for the supplier domain
- Streamlined requirements definition and test case development with predefined implementation assets
- Expedited integration using prebuilt integrations for D&B, BvD, Salesforce, and prebuilt connectors—all available as an add-ons
To view the full, in-depth webinar—featuring live demos, thorough examinations, and more—you can view an archived version here.