Informatica Enterprise Data Management

To paraphrase the Paul Simon song, there must be 50 ways to integrate your enterprise data. In recent years, companies have made all kinds of attempts to integrate both their applications and data - employing techniques from sophisticated enterprise application integration projects all the way down to manual hand coding. However, while most of these approaches work at least some of the time, few, if any, are delivering real agility for their businesses.

Recently, I had the opportunity to moderate a Webcast - sponsored by Informatica and hosted by ebizQ - which explored in detail an emerging approach, called data services, which ties into service oriented architecture (SOA) and creates a data abstraction layer that addresses the complexities seen across enterprise data environments.

Leading the Webcast were Ash Parikh, principal product marketing manager for Informatica and a highly regarded industry speaker and author, and David Ramos, director of business intelligence and analytics for LinkShare Corporation.

In his presentation, Ash urged closer collaboration between the enterprise data management and emerging service oriented architecture (SOA) worlds. (John Schmidt recently provided a nice overview of SOA here at the EDM blogsite.)

Ash observed that current approaches to enterprise data management have worked well from an application point of view, but have been ineffective for enterprise data. [Read more]

The most recent TDWI Boston Chapter meeting focused on how companies should approach and implement Master Data Management (MDM). Although the meeting had a keynote presenter and panelists with strong industry expertise and experience, the key to the discussions were the questions and insights of the audience attending the meeting.

The Boston chapter, with industries representing financial services, insurance, high tech, medical devices, biotech, retail, professional services and consumer products goods companies offers a diversity of perspectives about the challenges and benefits of addressing MDM.

Two key insights kept being reinforced during the discussions:

1. Leverage, Leverage, Leverage

Any company that will benefit from tackling MDM has most likely already been attacking the problem but not in the focused manner that MDM needs to truly be successful. But the biggest mistake that people saw with their peers and early adopters was the belief that MDM was something different than before.

Too often MDM is pitched as a "green field" opportunity with some solution as the "silver bullet" to one's problems. This approach fails to leverage past efforts from a business and technical perspective, thereby creating the potential for yet another application and data silo.

And, more importantly, failing to realistically assess the shortcomings and successes of existing efforts in making master data consistent is a sure fire way to plan to fail, i.e. repeating the failures of history is inevitable if you fail to learn from them.

Participants suggested looking at existing data warehousing and data integration efforts to leverage data, technical and people resources. Learn from the past.  Turn your joint IT and business efforts to define and manage data into a full-fledged  data governance program. If you have already started that type of program, expand  it and tie it into business successes (below).

2. Business Value

There needs to be specific business value derived from your MDM efforts. Catch phrases like "360 degrees of the customer" or "single version of the truth" are great marketing slogans but are esoteric and will become the brunt of jokes if they don't help you achieve real business value that can be measured. You can use these slogans to rally the troops and to get funding for the MDM efforts, but don't fall into that trap of believing your own sales pitch.

Your MDM will undoubtedly provide business ROI. Participants stressed that you should seek out those business opportunities and target your MDM towards them. Focused MDM efforts are more likely to get business participation, a critical success factor, to help you be on track to building your MDM program. Trying  to boil the ocean, i.e. trying to solve everyone's problems all at once,  generally fails to solve anyone's problems.

There are countless business processes or analytics that can be and are improved  by implementing MDM in your company. Find them, document them and determine  the business ROI that you can quantify or qualify. Get the business people involved  to be your customer references to sell the MDM program.

Success breeds success.

Last week we talked about how people, politics and projects have established integration silos throughout an enterprise that are costly, inefficient and inhibit the use of data as a corporate asset. How do you stop the madness? There are three key deliverables to breaking the silos and establishing an enterprise-wide integration initiative:

1. Enlist sponsorship
2. Establish an integration investment portfolio
3. Create an Integration Competency Center (ICC)

Enlist sponsorship.
First, you have to establish the business and technical case for an enterprise-wide integration approach. It should be straightforward to justify that the project-by-project approach is too costly, too inefficient (from time and resource perspectives) and too ineffective (since each project is re-inventing the wheel.)

But the justification isn’t just about saving money and time in the long-run, but more importantly as the key ingredient to truly implementing data governance. Of course, the goal of the justification is to enlist sponsorship, both from your business and IT leadership. Although many initiatives start from the bottom in order to establish success and credibility, at some point, to truly achieve an enterprise-wide approach your CFO and CIO have to become sponsors. The CFO is necessary both from a budget and a data governance (ownership) perspective and your CIO has to commit the IT organization to approaching integration from an enterprise-wide perspective and not just on a tactical project basis.
[Read more]