The Importance Of Data Integration And Data Quality In Master Data Management Initiatives
“Put simply, if you ignore data integration or do not treat it as being of sufficient importance then your MDM project will fail.” Philip Howard, Bloor Research – Master Data Management and Integration: Complementary but Distinct.
The above statement is both direct and powerful and I believe most would regard it as true. Key requirements of any MDM solution include data access, data synchronization, profiling, transforming, cleansing and entity resolution. These simply cannot be met without a strong data integration and quality infrastructure. Since Informatica excels in these areas and MDM vendors generally do not, there are a lot of synergies between Informatica and MDM projects regardless of whether you chose to build your own or implement a packaged MDM solution.
It is also important that you do not view data integration and data quality in a silo as it relates to the MDM project. That is, you should look at it as a required component to your MDM initiative, but also separate from MDM projects because the infrastructure can be used more widely throughout your organization. (more…)
A Culture of Data Quality
A company’s data may be one of their most significant assets and provide its greatest competitive advantage; does your organization treat it as such? In my experiences working with various organizations I am always interested to see the variety of ways in which they view their data.
The ones that are most successful in their data management practices are the ones that have established a culture of data quality. This culture starts at the executive level and permeates throughout the entire organization. Data quality issues are not viewed as an IT problem, but as an organizational problem.
These companies not only have a strong understanding of their data, but in addition they also understand the processes that create the data. The insight gained from this, better enables them to correct their data by both cleaning up the processes and implementing IT strategies to correct data in back-end systems.
Ralph Kimball has written a white paper entitled An Architecture for Data Quality. In it he discusses how to establish a culture of data quality. It is a good read and worth checking out. Lastly, I am interested in your comments in regards to how your organization treats its data. Does it consider it a strategic asset?
M&A – An Integration Challenge?
It seems like almost a lifetime has passed, but six months ago at Informatica World 2008, one of the keynote presentations contained a demonstration of the Informatica Platform. The demo focused on how Informatica products can help companies before, during and after a merger or acquisition (M&A) to address integration challenges. The relevance of it still stands today.
Early in the demo, Adam Wilson stated that there were 4.5 trillion dollars of M&A activity last year, representing over 45,000 transactions. Based on those numbers, I think it is safe to say that the majority of the market has probably been impacted by M&A in some shape or form.
Adam went on to say that 3-6 months post-M&A, most companies cannot get a consolidated view of financial or operational data and even after 2-3 years, 32% of companies still cannot achieve this. While certain types of M&A activity has slowed in 2008, there is still a flurry of activity going on especially for companies that buy and collect debt, thus many companies are still facing significant integration challenges.
One of those challenges is rationalizing data assets. It is likely that after M&A, companies will have duplicate customers, vendors, and potentially products across their IT systems. For example, the same entity may be represented in different ways across systems such as Bank of America, BofA, Bank of Am., etc. Rationalizing these data assets can be challenging, but with the right set of tools it can be managed. Data quality technology can help address this issue, by not only helping to identify these near duplicates through fuzzy matching technology, but it can also allow standardization of the data values so there are a common set of terms.
The demo is available on the Informatica web site and is entitled The Informatica Platform: Release 8.6.
Have a look and let me know your views. Are you currently or have you recently experienced any M&A activity? Was data quality an issue for you?
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