Mark “Bald as a Kiwi” Smith asked the other day:

I am working with a global bank that is considering implementing MDM (Microsoft Dynamics Marketing – t.j.).

I need to provided them documented information on how PII (Personally identifiable information – t.j.) data is handled with MDM. They currently run CRM2013 on premises.

Roger “Wicked keeper” Gilchrist was quite generous to share his experience that is both thorough and eloquent. If I knew enough about MDM, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Without further ado:

I’ve actually been working with a number of enterprise customers around this. Working with a number of banks on exactly this and have a number, <deleted> being the most public example, where they do this already.

Most of the discussions eventually have come down to a few key points:

• The data you need to put up in MDM to communicate with customers e.g. via email, is information you’re eventually going to send over the internet anyway when you do the email send, so name, email address for example is all information that will eventually be sent over the internet, so the concern over storing that in MDM in the cloud becomes diluted and rarely a real regulatory or compliance issue at that point
• Where it can sometimes get more tricky is around sensitive data they want to use to segment the customers. If this is a concern, what can be done is to do the segmentation inside your CRM system and generate a marketing list with the results, and just sync the resultant marketing list to MDM,
  • so you may have a marketing list which is called ‘New product X campaign – Dec 14’ ( which doesn’t give anything away but is directly linked to the communication) or a less discrete ‘High Net worth individuals’ which can be targeted in multiple campaigns without exposing exactly on what basis that determination was done
  • The advantage is you can then do the segmentation on-premises and the underlying data never leaves the premises but the resulting target list and communication in MDM
• The other reality of this, is that the vast majority of marketing players in the market are also online based, obviously particularly so for electronic communication, so where you use alternative vendors they will hit the same issue and often already are without necessarily realising it.
• You then have a choice how much additional information you put into MDM to do further communication or segmentation in MDM itself, but that is a choice, but with the two combinations above you typically hit the main scenarios that are of immediate concern

That’s a conversation we’ve had with a wide range of enterprise customers, including those in the FS (financial services – t.j.) sector and deploying successfully based on those principles.