Informatica Perspectives

Last week we sent out two press releases talking about the role of "data" in delivering on Governance, Risk and Compliance. It had me wondering on the importance of data integration - strategic or tactical?

The first "Informatica Delivers Comprehensive, Timely, and Trusted Data For Governance, Risk, and Compliance" was designed to kickoff a campaign we are running on this subject. I think that this is something Informatica is good at - helping companies to pull together trusted, accurate data to meet these requirements. My colleague John Schmidt was commenting recently on why data integration should be considered as a strategic discipline, and not simply a tactical activity. I can't think of anything more strategic than delivering data for such purposes - after all, the alternative seems to be "go to jail"!

The second release "IDC EMEA Report Finds That SEPA Fatigue Leaves Banks in Limbo" results from a research report conducted by IDC in relation to the latest set of regulatory requirements to hit the finance sector - namely the Single European Payment Area (SEPA) which went live in January this year. We sponsored this research with Atos Origin because we felt that it was important to understand how financial institutions are implementing this regulation and what the results have been. The resulting paper, which you can obtain here, highlights the relatively lack-lustre approach that many banks have taken to this mandatory regulation. It also highlights the role that data plays in moving information between financial institutions. We now live within a society in which information is the primary currency being traded and anything that can be done to lowering the cost of transacting "information" between institutions is a good thing.

This comes back to the point made by John (above) in how data integration has become a strategic discipline and not a set of tactical processes. Whether you are looking for assistance in moving data between companies, or migrating data to a new system, or consolidating data from disparate systems, or integrating data within cloud computing services, or … [the list goes on], it is important to recognize that you should adopt a strategic platform in doing this because all the individual tactical processes that are talked about soon become strategic. The sooner one recognizes this, the sooner one can reap the benefits of a data integration platform to help drive efficiencies across all these processes and ensure that you are lowering your cost of managing data across your enterprise.

Executives should be asking themselves some pretty basic questions:

1. How much do you trust your data?
2. What happens if you use outdated information?
3. Do you have complete visibility and insight into your business?

These were some of the questions I was pondering while reading a recent white paper authored by one of my colleagues. It was talking about how the delivery of complete and trusted data can help your organization to manage Governance, Risk, and Compliance. With advice and knowledge from real-world customer stories, it explained both how to reduce the cost of producing timely and trusted data for Governance, Risk and Compliance as well as showing how timely, high quality information can satisfy regulatory data audit and documentation requirements.

Delivering trusted data is something that should be on the forefront of executives minds, and the technology is here now to help companies achieve this in a cost effective manner.

Seems pretty strategic to me - what do you think?