Informatica Perspectives

Poring over our customers’ project descriptions, I discovered that a high number of organizations are tackling Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) and Master Data Management (MDM) initiatives. Multiple business imperatives are driving the demand for such IT projects. We tend to hear a lot about financial reporting including risk and compliance, and operational applications that touch on customers around EBI and MDM.

The former is focused on driving productivity of IT and financial staff in their analytical processes while ensuring auditability and visibility. The latter, operational environment is being transformed by the “single view of X” types of operational projects, such as managing inventory effectively and having the right products and services to increase a share of wallet. To me, a data-driven enterprise is an organization with a full command of managing information across these analytical and operational processes for organizational excellence. One minute savings per employee is dramatic when you think about tens of thousands of employees. In contrast, one costly mistake in financial reporting could have severe impacts to shareholder value.

Speaking to the three themes of Informatica 9, Data services empowers an organization to gain virtualized access to data from the financial systems and deliver consolidated financial data for timely, accurate reporting and transparency. The finance department typically has the “close-gap” target, like reducing the time to close the book from 30 days to 10 days, for instance. Pervasive data quality allows business analysts to set up and share web-based scorecards measuring the quality of operational data—e.g. product codes, customer ship-to information, supplier data—so data quality issues can be made visible to the business process owners in order for them to be held accountable for improving data quality and reducing financial losses due to data quality errors. Business and IT collaboration helps ensure that people from both business and IT are working on a common set of rules for the data, rather than the business writing rules in documents and spreadsheets, which then could be misinterpreted by IT who are implementing the rules in the IT systems.

An organization nowadays has a thin margin for error but must try new ideas and innovate. Fortunately, with greater cohesion and sophistication of understanding their business conditions, many data-driven enterprises are talking to us about gaining market share, planning for new market entry and sustaining readiness for growth. They see the tremendous potential in using the scale derived from a data-driven operation and going to market with the right mix of products, services and operating models. Given that, we are keen to serve our clients and prospects with our advancements in Informatica 9, helping your business transform and emerge anew as a leader in its category.