Informatica Perspectives

Komerční banka.

Fresh off a flight from London, Dave Schrader, our friend from Teradata, alerted me that our joint Teradata-Informatica customer, Komerční banka, a Société Générale bank, won the prestigious, EMEA Business Intelligence Award 2010 at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit!

In their press release,
http://www.kb.cz/en/com/press/releases/781.shtml

Pavel Čejka, Komerční banka Executive Director, Strategy and Finance, comments on the great benefits of BI: "I believe that one of the strengths of financial management at KB is the existence of a unified database and performance indicators, which are interconnected and focused not only on financial data, which I consider to be a matter of course, but also on business, product, risk, operating and other information."

Teradata and Informatica were highlighted as part of the first-class technologies in the project. It involved the implementation of user metadata and an information quality program. [Read more]

This is the last posting in a 5 part series on the non-traditional challenges to achieving data quality. In Part 4, I reviewed the Data Quality Perception Gap. In this post, I will conclude with the Delivery Gap.

The Data Quality Delivery Gap
Once we have successfully marketed, positioned and sold our Data Quality solution, we must shift our focus to delivery. The surest way to secure additional business is to gain customer confidence and there is no better way to do this than through demonstrated competence. While there are many variables that can impact delivery effectiveness, of those that we can control, skills are the most critical. This brings us to the seventh non-traditional challenge…….successful data quality projects can be delivered with generalists. If the business needs an experienced product manager, they don't hire a payroll specialist. Then why staff a data quality role with an accountant, or a sales operations manager, or an SQL developer? Yet, this is often what happens, and when the effort fails it is at the expense of data quality's reputation. [Read more]

This week ChannelWeb announced their 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors. As they note:

“What makes these 100 cloud vendors collected here so cool isn't just the technology. These guys attack the cloud with a certain panache. A sort of swagger, if you will. They get the job done and they look good doing it.”

ChannelWeb divided the “Cool Cloud Computing Vendors" into five categories:

• 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Productivity App Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors
• 20 Coolest Cloud Security Vendors

Informatica was recognized as a Cool Cloud Infrastructure Vendor. Here’s what they had to say: [Read more]

Back in June 2009, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) published Financial Accounting Statements No. 166, Accounting for Transfers of Financial Assets, and No. 167, Amendments to FASB Interpretation No. 46(R), which changes the way entities account for securitizations and special-purpose entities. The new standards will impact financial institution balance sheets beginning in 2010 and will require substantive changes to how banks account for many items, including securitized assets that had been previously excluded from these organizations' balance sheets. Banks affected by the new accounting standards will be subject to higher risk-based regulatory capital requirements. So what does it all mean and how much will it cost banks to comply?  [Read more]

As a follow up to my previous post Data As An Asset Part 1 – Should Data be on your Balance Sheet?, let’s get back to the balance sheet question and ask it differently – how COULD an organization go about formally valuing their information assets?

There is a relatively straight-forward way to establish the initial value of data assets by simply adding up the costs associated with creating the data. In other words, we could quite easily figure out what it costs to initially create the data – the acquisition cost. Once we have the initial value established, we could use standard depreciation models such as straight-line or accelerated depreciation to account for the deterioration in the value over time. [Read more]

Last week we completed the acquisition of Siperian – the proven leader in multi-domain MDM.  This is our fourth acquisition in the last 12 months and potentially the single most important acquisition that Informatica has ever done since moving beyond ETL with the acquisition of Similarity Systems in 2006. You can read the press release about Siperian here, and watch a video of my colleague Ivan Chong, General Manager of our Data Quality Business Unit, here.

There has also been a lot of talk about the acquisition in the last few days – such as the commentary from Forrester research analyst Rob Karel, Ventana Research analyst Mark Smith, or Lorraine Lawson over at ITBusinessEdge.  However, I wanted to give my perspective on why I believe this is important to you, our customers: [Read more]

In my last posting, I introduced the 4 Data Quality Gap Areas that are associated with the non-traditional challenges to achieving data quality success and discussed in some detail the Data Quality Expectations Gap. In this post, I will cover the Positioning Gap.

The Data Quality Positioning Gap

Once we have identified our customers, determined what motivates them and defined the offer, we need to market or "position" our solution. And it goes without saying that we need to do this within the context of what problem we are trying to solve. Enter the third non-traditional challenge…….data quality is incorrectly positioned as an end, rather than the means. More times than not, this is the direct result of not understanding customer motivators as outlined in my previous post on the Expectations Gap. We erroneously conclude that the customer is looking for data quality and we further perpetuate the mismatch between expectation and message. [Read more]

I ended 2009 blogging with my 2010 predictions. Now that we're in 2010, I'll begin the new year with resolutions we can all make to move our organizations forward - to become information driven. My purpose is to provide quick anecdotes that are actionable so you can see immediate results.

1. Ask your IT applications manager to profile the customer data in two or three systems such as sales, marketing and your customer portal. Ask the IT person to quantify the quality of the information in each one. For example, how many duplicate contacts are there, how many customers are not ‘mailable' or ‘emailable', how many contacts are missing critical information for sales effectiveness. Once you have that information and know the quality of your data, you can accurately make the business case for what your bad data is costing you. This should result in helping secure the funding necessary to address these issues. [Read more]

Darren Cunningham, in his recent blog post How to Migrate To The Cloud, made some great points around the use of staging for data integration for cloud computing. The reasons he would leverage a staging area for cloud computing include:

• It enables better business control before the data is pushed from one system to the other.
• It enables tracking and reconciliation of a business process.
• It enables the addition of new sources or targets with reuse instead of building the spaghetti plate of point to point direct interfaces. It responds to the SOA paradigm.
• It breaks the dependencies between the two systems enabling asynchronous synchronization or synchronous with different size of data set (single message or bulk). [Read more]

You often hear people say “Information is our greatest asset”. If that’s true, why can’t we find “data” assets on the financial balance sheet? Some organizations do indeed capitalize IT investments, but primarily in order to spread the costs over a number of years and not because they are valuing their data assets. Occasionally you might find data on the balance sheet such as the customer lists valued at $14.5B on AT&T’s 2007 financial statements – but again this was a one-time event related to the acquisition of Bell South and not because AT&T systematically values their data. [Read more]