“(…) 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.

Just to do a quick correspondance to MDM capabilities and Vint’s message:

“Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically.”

This is related to locations. Modern MDM solutions can uniquely identify locations, both geographically and logically.

“It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood”

Companies need to uniquely identify devices, or assets as they’re normally named in the MDM world. This would be coupled with RFID solutions so that these assets can be automatically identified. Some types of assets are already equiped with functionality that can enable localization based services (i.e. GPS, GSM triangulation, etc), and users can choose to expose the asset’s identity to cloud services, making the services rendered even more 1:1.  This is of course at the center of any MDM strategy: being able to uniquely identify something or someone (asset, location, person (party), contracts, products, etc…), and use this unique and consolidated information to provide a first class service adapted to the context.

Vint also talks about information sharing:

“By sharing information through the Internet about (…) devices and systems, we will be able to make them more efficient”

But uniquely identifying these devices and systems, and other types of connected artefacts, is primordial to harvest the full effect of the information sharing. This is again where MDM comes into play.

Companies that have do MDM will harvest this efficiency gain. But something tells me that companies that are (more or less) openly sharing this information (in a secure and anonymous manner) with the market, will contribute to and recover an even larger efficiency gain.

Your comments are, of course, welcome.