Have you noticed how many of the important new initiatives over the past year revolve around data and information? We’ve been seeing a greater impetus to measures such as master data management, service oriented architecture, data integration, business process management, the rise of open source data warehouses and BI, the rise of data warehouse appliances, and the blooming of the cloud computing revolution. On top of all this has been heightened concern - and action - over data security.

Not only is PowerCenter Informatica’s flagship product line, it’s also an appropriate description for what’s become of the data management function in recent times. No longer is the job of data management to maintain rows and columns or design query statements. As developments over the past year showed us, it’s a whole new ballgame.

How well is your team positioned to assume the role of “Power Center” to serve new and emerging business requirements? Here are some of the key initiatives that drove data management over the past year:

Data managers are becoming full partners to the business. There’s no question that tougher economic times require organizations to better manage resources, and operate smarter. But even in the best of times, companies are hard-pressed to maintain a competitive edge. This calls for the ability to compete on analytics, to deploy business intelligence across all activities of the enterprise. There’s never been a time when data – converted to actionable information – has been more critical to business success.  And data managers are evolving into critical roles as advisors and consultants to businesses that seek to better compete on analytics to stay ahead.

A new generation of smarter technologies and management approaches continues to sweep away the expensive, complicated, siloed solutions of old. Cloud computing-based solutions offer access to powerful applications on a pay-as-you-go basis, while Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0-based services offer functionality that non-technical business users can rapidly leverage to get projects done. Service oriented architecture approaches help to encapsulate back end applications and data – long closed off to access – into standardized services that can be quickly deployed and accessed as the business changes. In recent times, we began to recognize that data integration needs to be inextricably linked to SOA, which cannot deliver value without accurate, reliable data.

Organizations are moving toward single versions of the truth. Data warehousing technology has long offered a means to centralize data from selected departments across the enterprise into a single, accessible repository. Now, organizations are taking this concept a step further with master data management (MDM), in which both systems or record and systems of entry are managed as a single body of data or metadata. Organizations recognize that department managers should not have to spend hours trying to reconcile data, and MDM offers a solution.

Command-and-control hierarchies are out; task-driven teams are in. How closely are you collaborating with other teams and business users across and outside your organization? In terms of technology, collaboration in the past would have required the purchase and installation of intranets and groupware systems. Tools such as blogs and wikis now enable ubiquitous access to collaboration easy and inexpensive. Data integration across the enterprise requires a strong collaborative team-based approach, and solutions exist to make this a reality.

If anything, the year 2009 promises to be just as interesting – and challenging – as the year that just passed. This is the time to position data management as the “Power Center” businesses can rely on for efficiency and new growth opportunities.