Monthly Archives: March 2009
10 Questions you need to ask when writing an RFP for MDM
Critical master data management (MDM) functionality can be easily overlooked when request for proposals (RFP) are narrowly focused on a single business data type—such as customer (Customer Data Integration) or product (Product Information Management) — or on near-term requirements within a single business function. Consequently, IT teams and systems integrators alike run the risk of selecting and investing in technologies that may be difficult to extend to other data types or difficult to scale across the organization. Worse, such solutions will likely require costly custom coding down the road in order to add additional business data entities or to extend the system to other lines of business. These mistakes are easily avoided, but to do so it is important to keep the following ten capabilities in mind as your prepare your RFP. If a prospective vendor can’t answer in the affirmative to all ten questions, keep looking.
Ten Costly RFP Mistakes to Avoid
1. Will we be able to manage multiple business data entities within a single MDM platform?
2. Can the solution support my organization’s unique data governance needs?
3. Will it work with our standard workflow tool?
4. Is the MDM solution capable of supporting complex relationships and hierarchies?
5. Does the system rely on a flexible Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model that automatically generates changes to the SOA services whenever the data model is updated?
6. Can we cleanse data inside the MDM platform?
7. Does the system allow for probabilistic matching using an assortment of matching techniques, including deterministic, probabilistic, heuristic, phonetic, linguistic, empirical, etc.?
8. Can the system create and maintain a golden record encompassing master data from different sources, which can be reconciled and centrally stored within a master data hub?
9. Is the solution designed to closely track history and lineage in order to support regulatory compliance?
10. Can the solution be implemented for several modes of operation, including analytical and operational?
In Turbulent Times, It Pays to See Information as It Happens
Real-time and near real-time capabilities have been the watchwords of the industry for about a decade now, but only recently have we seen a convergence of the technology and methodologies – such as data warehousing and data integration platforms – that make it an affordable reality for most companies.
The drive to real-time was highlighted in a recent InformationWeek report, which says that manufacturers and retailers lead the way in using up-to-the-minute point-of-sale data to avoid stock-outs and overproduction.
The InformationWeek article points to the challenges manufacturers and retailers face in demand forecasting, in which manufacturers analyze weekly and even daily point-of-sale data from retailers so that they can better see what’s selling and where. Retailers have had a tough time predicting demand in today’s turbulent economy. (more…)
Data Migration And Application ILM: A Union Made In Heaven
So you’ve managed to reduce your IT budget focused on KTLO (Keep-the-lights-on) by automating a lot of the manual-intensive integration processes using the latest data integration platform.
In doing this, you lowered your upfront TCO through ease-of-use, prebuilt connectivity, reusable logic and rules, and are benefiting from lower ongoing costs through scalability and performance, ease of administration and seamless upgrades.
You found the required staff to manage the myriad of integration challenges all across your IT shop by tapping into the large community of Informatica specialists available and implemented an ICC to mirror companies like T. Rowe Price, HP and Avaya who achieved significant savings through their ICC’s. (This might have come about from your conversation with Gartner whose research on ICC’s convinced you that you could achieve 25% reuse of integration components; 30% savings in integration development time and costs and 20% savings in maintenance costs).
By the way, have you tried the ICC calculator using this data to show how much you could save?
OK, so you did all that and you have a more efficient IT shop with savings enough to rollout that single critical application that you’ve been asked to complete for the last 6 months. Now what? (more…)
What’s Core for IT?
Welcome to my first blog. Being a CIO of an enterprise software company poses unique challenges, different from other industries. Oddly enough, I would posit that what many know as traditional IT, unto itself, does not provide a strategic competitive advantage for companies.
This may, in fact, be unique that someone who runs IT for a company might say this. I’m sure many of you could debate this fact.
Ultimately, I believe it’s important for a CIO to determine:
- How the IT function can be strategic
- What is core to business success
- What is contextual, i.e. parity
Within Informatica, we are relentless in managing the information that drives our company. Information at Informatica provides a strategic competitive advantage for our company, and this is the focus for IT. (more…)
Who’s That Looking At My Master Data?
So you’ve finally managed to convince everyone who has a stake that building this MDM Hub is the right thing to do. You have the data ready to be loaded from a variety of applications (sources) and you are even preparing to provide a business user interface (See MDM for the Business Masses, It’s Time) to access the data. Then you get that bone chilling thought that reverberates down to your spine, are you going to be able to manage all of the authentication and authorization of the various new users of the Hub? Of course, you could issue new userids and passwords, that seems simple enough and Single Sign On seems appropriate. But can you really map all the roles and “rules of visibility” to data that belonged to Fred in the CRM system, while ensuring that Jane who only was able to see back office details in the ERP system continues to be similarly restricted in her view of the new combined master data?
Fortunately, most mature MDM platforms are expected to handle fine-grained security down to the cell level as well as having multiple ways of defining role assignments. Furthermore, your security infrastructure team would most likely have already been part of the MDM evaluation process and ensured that the MDM Platform can integrate with the incumbent security systems/infrastructure of choice. Finally that new MDM Platform you are using gives you comprehensive history and lineage of its master data for maintaining complete audit trails, which again allows you to further reduce risk and improve regulatory compliance.
Whew! You wake up in a cold sweat realizing it’s just a dream, everything is fine nothing to worry about; all this was included as part of the evaluation process … thanks to that blog post you read way back when …
Data Migration Is Not About Moving Data – Part II
Last week I wrote about the need to adopt and develop a risk-based management framework within which to execute data migration initiatives. I also looked at how a tools-based approach provided the essential building blocks with which to build such a framework.
This week let’s talk about how such an approach can help substantially address the first of our common pain points; “data discovery is skipped due to time or resource constraints.”
The net effect of this omission is easily and neatly summarized in the “code, load & explode” truism. This is where the migration process is coded to invalid data assumptions about its structure, content or compliance to known business rules; and not the reality. The actual reality is often only encountered at some significant milestone in a project where remediation is often very costly in terms of resource and budget. Both of which can significantly impact the ability to meet anticipated timelines. (more…)
Data Quality For The First US CIO
InfoWorld recently published an article by Paul Venezia entitled “10 IT agenda items for the first US CIO.” In reading through the article, I thought that some of the recommendations that Venezia makes could be more effective if a data quality strategy were also included as a part of the agenda.
For instance, the first suggested agenda item calls for “Mandatory restitution for customer data leaks.” Although this is primarily focused on data breaches and the impact to consumers, my recommendation is that this agenda item should be expanded to include requiring a data quality firewall.
By doing so, any data coming into or leaving an organization would have standard data quality processes enforced. Since data manipulation continues to move to more of a real-time process, having sufficient checks of the data, including standardizing key fields and looking for duplicates, is a way to ensure data integrity is maintained both at the source as well as throughout the data movement process. (more…)
Exploring What it Means to ‘Make Better Decisions’
What’s missing from business intelligence? We have well-populated data warehouses and metadata repositories, we have robust data integration tools, and we have a variety of front-end BI and analytic tools. However, the challenge is to vastly increase the value of these investments by orienting them to assist people and processes in better decision-making.
I recently caught up with Neil Raden, co-author of Smart (Enough) Systems and founder of Hired Brains Inc., to get more insights on the next steps for business intelligence and analytics. (more…)
How To Avoid Common MDM False Starts
Companies wishing to start a Master Data Management (MDM) project may be unsure where and how to begin. MDM is a journey and success or failure at the first step either defines or dooms the further evolution of the project. Recently, industry analysts have been recommending a cautious approach to starting with MDM – suggesting that companies start with a single data type (such as customer), implement MDM using a small footprint (such as registry style) or deploy MDM solely with a data warehouse to improve reporting. Inherently these technology focused approaches reduce project risk and relieve the data governance burden. Companies may readily adopt these approaches as perfectly reasonable starting points and lean to a more risk-averse approach to their initial MDM implementation in hopes of mitigating risks. However, these same approaches may limit the scope and potential return on investment (ROI) from MDM since they do not attempt to solve the most pressing and difficult business problems.
Some MDM vendor solutions only support a single data set (customer, product, etc), architecture style such as registry or can only be deployed for a single usage – either operational or analytical. These solutions simply cannot be extended to other architectural styles or another usage mode which can severely limit their usefulness in addressing the most challenging of business problems. In addition, a technology-centric start will not fulfill the most important needs around enterprise master data governance.
MDM is more precisely about solving business problems by efficiently managing master data that is critical to a company’s business operations. How to get started? A pragmatic place to begin is to answer these three questions:
1. Which business problems need to be tackled?
2. What is the business use?
3. What are the business requirements for master data governance?
What becomes obvious from answering these questions is that MDM will almost always require a multi-entity deployment (such as customer and product) and an architectural style that is not restricted to registry alone. In most instances, synchronization with both operational and analytical systems may also be essential to effectively address the specific business needs of your organization.
Lean Integration Part 9: Deming’s 14 Points
This article is the next installment of the “10 weeks to Lean Integration” series. If you are joining the discussion now, you may want to start by reading the first posting.
The philosophy of W. Edwards Deming is a key contribution to Lean practices. Deming believed that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations could increase quality and reduce costs while increasing customer loyalty. The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as separate steps. (more…)
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