There are many benefits to reap from master data management (MDM). Providing higher efficiency or enabling new business – a positive ROI is almost unavoidable regardless which industry you serve or organization you operate.

Taking retail as an example, mastering your various data domains addresses some of the most business-critical issues such as growing the product catalog, increasing customer loyalty, reducing product returns and accelerating sales.

One of the reasons for Amazon’s stunning success is their vast number of products – 564 million in the US alone according to the latest count. This makes Amazon more than an online shop; it’s a search engine for shopping.

As an MDM manager at a retailer, you probably want to imitate that success. This means, you have to launch new products quickly and reliably. This is only possible by means of product data syndication. The obstacle for a fast product launch is usually not logistics or even really about the physical product; it’s about the processing of that physical product’s master data twin.

Established companies know the number of resources it takes to push a product through development: sketching and designing, numerous trips through R&D, distribution and promotion. Furthermore, as competition for customer attention increases, agile product development and sales processes will become critical.

Does your IT architecture partly consist of legacy systems, citizen apps, shadow IT or deprecated systems? Here are some of the pros and cons that you should consider before retiring an IT system.