The story was in the press earlier, but I have to admit that I heard it at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Frankfurt for the first time this year.

In this case the police called pacemaker data an ‘excellent investigative tool’ that provided ‘key pieces of evidence’ to charge a man with arson and insurance fraud.The data collected from his “device/ thing” (heart rate, pacer demand and cardiac rhythms) before, during and after the fire, clearly proved that he was not in panic.

This story is just one of many in the world which will be massively impacted by the IoT (Internet of Things). Numbers of connected devices are growing by orders of magnitude. Every business will use data from outside.

You may thing the apple watch on the apple web shop is only two sized and about ten different arm bands and in the meantime three generation which is about 60 different product SKUs to manage. So why should I need a MDM solution to manage this? Well, the press says the watch was sold more then 33 million times, which massively changes the game about data. 33 million different data sets and profiles (for example: I am a runner and my neigbour does not do any sport but has the same watch), which can be used to improve product development or cross- and up-sell potential. Think about what this means for your business.

It is time to master things!

In my next blog I will go deeper on the success criteria for the MDM (Master Data Management) of Things. And this is much more than mastering products. It will be about massive scale and connectivity and all humans expect relevant data for decision making as employees or customers in real-time.