The success of any business process is dependent on members across various internal functional groups and how they collaborate.
This is highly relevant in database management, which involves multiple processes, teams & functions working at various levels, with huge volumes of data being the driving force. Hence, cross-functional collaboration is the need of the hour in realizing the due performance of business operations and achieving desired objectives.
The skyrocketing digital transformation trend makes a strong pitch for cross-functional collaboration as an effective means to implementing business processes successfully, and cultural transformation stands crucial in this change.
A critical component of VMware’s digital transformation efforts, the Master Data Management (MDM) project relies on cross-functional collaboration at the core of its transformative process.
As part of the MDM implementation, the VMware Unified Data (VUD) program is striving to deliver critical data management capabilities to enable SaaS transformation and empower employees, partners & customers with the right information at the right time.
And the VUD program goals are clearly defined to ensure core capabilities and dependencies of business stakeholders are readily implemented for quick consumption as and when needed.
VUD Program and Stakeholder Dependencies
The end-users of VUD are stakeholders from a wide array of internal business units, and they hope to derive value from having all their necessary data, pertaining to different functions, at a central location (i.e. a master database).
Not all BUs utilize VUD the same way because of their very specific expectations and business requirements of data and capabilities that VUD should provide.
For instance, the Tax team may use VUD’s customer data to identify a customers’ tax exemption status for financial reporting purposes, the Legal & Compliance team may be interested in isolating government entities, and so on.
Given this background of different business functions and use cases , a proper collaboration among cross-functional groups is essential for a better understanding of the value master database can deliver to its end-users.
Cross-functional Collaboration at VMware: A Snapshot
The Enterprise Data Office (EDO) team at VMware integrates key enterprise applications with VUD, ensuring relevant master data is consumed by systems utilized by a wide variety of BUs.
Each of these enterprise boundary systems are mapped to different functions, which ultimately are the supportive workstreams to address core business dependencies of the key stakeholders.
Internally, every system is clearly defined with a name, description, unique identifier, information about the data housed, and the reason for MDM integration.
For instance, the Revenue team utilizes RevStream, the Sales org utilizes Salesforce, the Tax team uses Vertex, Customer Operations Success team uses GS Lightning and so on…
Achieving User Experience – The End Goal
The Enterprise Data Office (EDO) team at VMware works closely with various BUs to retrieve use cases, pain points, and business needs to be implemented and accomplished in VUD.
Alongside the engineering team, the team conducts regular catchups with functional groups, stakeholders and end-users about key capabilities and system integrations planned in every sprint.
These regular cadences provide due scope for concerns and data requirements to be vocalized by all involved parties.
Through continuous coordination with the engineering team, EDO team makes sure the capabilities and user stories created (in line with functional group requests) are implemented on time in line with end-user priorities.
The above approach not only avoids communication gaps, but also offers enough space for stakeholder feedbacks or concerns required for due improvements in VUD with each release.
Internally, the data team has identified the need to socialize VUD and its goal with teams beyond EDO, organization-wide, to emphasize the need for enriching existing data by having a Single Source of Truth (SSOT).
Communicating the VUD capabilities and data within VUD with all teams is key to ensure the database is, used correctly and to its full potential, and the VMware data team is consistently working towards improving its database potential.
On an End Note,
It’s critical for organizations to realize the value of having all critical data at a central location and collaborating cross-functionally to derive the right business value from a master database.
It’s time to act!
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