Informatica Enterprise Data Management

Do you have projects lined up for next year that will deal with reference data? It's a good idea, especially if you want to better understand your customers, determine the profitability of your products or work more effectively with your suppliers.

If your projects are formal they may be identified as master data management (MDM), customer data integration (CDI) or product information management (PIM). All of these are examples of reference data.

Getting your reference data in order – reflecting what is and was – helps to establish data consistently. This, in turn, enables historical analysis such as trending, and helps you plan for the future. Some of you will not have projects with the MDM, CDI or PIM labels, but if you look beneath the covers you almost inevitably will see efforts to improve your reference situation.

The reasons the MDM, CDI and PIM acronyms have emerged in our industry is because most businesses have not done a great job with reference data yet and because it is difficult. But, as with many things in life, if it was easy it probably wouldn’t be worth doing.

Don’t let a vendor convince you that all you need is their shiny new MDM, CDI or PIM product. Software alone won’t solve the problem; otherwise it would have been solved a long time ago.
Below are the three pillars of your reference initiative, regardless of the industry you are in or whether you label it as MDM, CDI, PIM or another acronym unique to your company:

• Data Governance
• Integration Competency Center (ICC)
• Data Integration

First, business and IT have to engage in an ongoing data governance effort. You can’t avoid that human interaction to get definitions and agreements on what the reference data is and what is means. It’s not just about formatting columns, but defining the definitions and relationships between them and all the necessary business transformations.

Second, too often each of these project teams feels their needs are different from anything your enterprise has done before. So, they go about re-inventing the wheel and creating a new silo. I keep seeing that happen at my clients' companies where they are implementing MDM and CDI initiatives. In some cases they are spending millions and creating silos of not just data, but also data integration processes. If only they planned and implemented a data integration architecture. If only they had an ICC to avoid making these mistakes.

Finally, reference data projects are all about data integration. You need to integrate data from multiple data sources and then distribute that data to all your systems, either enterprise applications or data warehousing environments, that need to use that reference data for operations or analysis.

Too often we look for the silver bullet when the answer is right under our nose. Engage your business people, plan your architecture, and implement consistent and comprehensive data integration. These are the key ingredients to ensuring your MDM, CDI or PIM projects succeed next year.