Critical master data management (MDM) functionality can be easily overlooked when request for proposals (RFP) are narrowly focused on a single business data type—such as customer (Customer Data Integration) or product (Product Information Management) — or on near-term requirements within a single business function. Consequently, IT teams and systems integrators alike run the risk of selecting and investing in technologies that may be difficult to extend to other data types or difficult to scale across the organization. Worse, such solutions will likely require costly and extensive custom coding in order to add additional business data entities or data sources, or to extend the system to other lines of business or geographies. In order to avoid these costly pitfalls, bolster the return on investment, and reduce the over-all project risk, it is important that your RFP include key business data requirements across several critical business functions including sales, marketing, customer support and compliance.

To avoid the common mistakes made by MDM software evaluation teams and ensure long term success, you should make sure that key components are built into your master data management RFP. By including these ten critical MDM requirements in your RFP, you will be well on your way to laying the foundation for a complete and flexible MDM solution that addresses your current requirements, and is also able to evolve to address unforeseen future data integration requirements across the organization.