Informatica Perspectives

There is a lot of worry on Wall Street and Main Street these days. Are we in a mild or severe recession? Is it the next Great Depression? How long will it last? No one knows the answers to these lofty questions, but Forrester Research has been busy recalibrating on the impact the economy is having on IT spending.

First, the good news, IT spending was better in the first half of this year than expected. The bad news, IT spending is being hit adversely now and probably into 2009. According to Forrester Research:

“The economy's affect on IT spending is evident in some specific data points contained in the report: Forty-three percent of firms have already cut their overall IT budgets in 2008 in reaction to the slow down in the global economy, while 24 percent of firms have put discretionary spending on hold. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said the economy has had no impact on their IT budgets.”

“Forrester: Impact Of Economic Downturn On Tech Spending Varies By Region And Sector”, Forrester Research, September 9, 2008

Even under the best circumstances it’s important to maximize the value from your BI/DW projects.  But with these conditions it becomes even more of an imperative.

No one can afford to be sloppy or wasteful in their business intelligence and data integration strategies. Cost cutting and getting by with what you have is the norm.

But mistakes are expensive. Businesses, now more than ever, need to understand who their current and potential customers are as well as how much revenue and profit each product or service line generates. This demands current, consistent, clean and comprehensive data.

Some vendors think they have the answer with their quick-hit solutions. Prepackaged analytics and corporate dashboards offer the allure of off-the-shelf solutions that take almost no work and instantly provide the business with the answers to all their questions. Many companies are buying or considering this approach. And why not? Packaged solutions appease their fears and satisfy their desire for instant solutions. And, the demo looks great!

If the solution looks too good to be true, step back and ask some questions. Read the fine print, such as the qualifiers that everything works fine only if all your data is clean, all the data is included in the supported sources and your business analytics match the prebuilt models. In short, the pre-built solution works IF you have all your data in place!

These systems may fall short of expectations when the business needs to get answers beyond what the demo or pilot provides. Where is the consistent, high-quality, detailed data that the business needs to make decisions? It’s stuck in a bunch of data silos - Guess what? You may have just added another one! And when you do not provide the data the business needs they go off and build some of their own data shadow systems.

If you want to conserve money, don’t create any more data silos or data shadow systems (and clean up your current ones.)