Every experienced CIO has been through an acquisition, merger or divestiture in his/her career. The pressure cooker starts when the CEO makes promises to the street and starts the results clock ticking. Expectations set during the pre-acquisition due diligence and planning process—expectations about operational metrics, timelines, and financial results— often bear little resemblance to post-acquisition reality. In my experience with our customers using our technology during M&A, data and how it’s managed plays a central role in meeting the street-committed results.

Putting aside the due diligence process, a challenge unto itself, typical post-merger projects that put data in the center of success are usually big ticket, highly visible IT efforts. Data Fragmentation and the challenges therein are really magnified when two IT organizations are forced to come together or in some cases, wrestle together.
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Let’s assume that you’ve got an Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) program in place. Now take an honest look. Is your EDW program going well? Is it serving your business groups or are they constantly asking for more?

And, no matter how successful you are, have you thought about what you should do to take your EDW program to the next level to enable time- and cost-effective information access and performance management solutions?

Want to get started answering these questions? I encourage readers to take Informatica’s free online enterprise data warehousing assessment and take a look at my recent white paper, A Case for Assessing Your Enterprise Data Warehousing Readiness. Don’t worry, both are free!

Be honest

Each question’s response is ranked low, medium and high, with “next steps” listed for you to explore. You should answer based on where you are now, not where you are going to be some day, maybe, if the business would just give you the resources and money to do everything you want.

The top score is 50, but even the “best” companies I know do not really score close to that level if they are truly answering where they are now. Many can have all the latest technologies and a lot of resources but have not really implemented across their enterprise. They have developed some awesome silos of “information nirvana,” but there are still many, many data silos working loosely coupled to these best-in-class silos.

When taking the assessment it is best to validate your responses with a business perspective. Also, if you have a systems integrator or consultant who is a trusted advisor have him or her fill out the assessment for you.

Some of the folks who fill out the assessment are not self-critical enough to depict what is truly happening in their enterprise. Often, IT folks are unaware of or do not consider two key pockets of data in their assessments:

• First, many enterprise applications are developing their own reporting and analytics solutions. These applications should be components of an overall EDW program, not competing projects.
• Second, and most frequently ignored, most enterprises have numerous and often significant data shadow systems (DSS). They build these systems using Microsoft Excel, and often Microsoft Access or SAS. Companies build these systems because the data they need is not available in the EDW environment. Other reasons might be that they cannot use the EDW’s unstructured data or they need data that is updated in real-time (or at least more frequently than it is in the EDW environment.)

Being big isn’t enough

Too many people think that they have solved their enterprise’s data-integration needs because they have large-terabyte data warehouses. But if the business users are getting a lot of data out of their enterprise applications (and then have to reconcile the data with the DW) or they spend a lot of time building and using data shadow systems then their job isn’t done yet.

Rather than developing a comprehensive, enterprise-wide EDW program, they’ve forced the business groups to build out the data-integration solution through their data shadow systems. When you examine your assessment results be sure to develop a plan that takes these results into account.

Take the survey with a critical eye toward what can you add or enhance to improve business ROI from your EDW efforts. It’s probably time to be planning for next year. Don’t be blind, everyone needs to improve or expand. You might have been doing a great job, but you’ve been too conservative in implementing new EDW architecture, technology and organizational approaches.