Integrating the social web with the corporate platform

One of the bloggers I follow is Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang. He’s writing an excellent blog on Web Strategy. These days, the hype concerns the Social Web, but Jeremiah has a larger focus, pointing out that something new will follow after this hype. As he interestingly points out:

“(…) most of my clients (large corporations) haven’t figured out how to fully embrace the social web –let alone think about what’s next. The only caveat being here is that the social web won’t go away, but will integrate, and soon a new type of technology will emerge to provide greater relevancy to content, people, activities and ideas.”

This is in line with what I said in my previous post on the Cloud and MDM. The problem for large corporations is that they’ve collected a substansial amount of information over the years. This information is spread around in silos across the enterprise. The goal of Master Data Management is to extract the master data from these silos, consolidate it and create golden copies of that information, making the master data available to the consumers of the information.

Embracing the social web is surely a difficult task for corporations, and MDM is an important step on that path. Integrating the social web with the corporate platform will be just so much more valuable that way.