I have been traveling to different cities on the Informatica 9 World Tour, talking to customers and partners about their painpoints around data and their ability to support the needs of the business.  In these discussions, one topic that has resonated strongly is the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde nature of data.

We all know that there’s simply more information and data out there nowadays.  More types of data, coming from more places: partners, customers, suppliers, cloud applications.  Exponentially growing volumes.  More people, both business and IT, getting involved with the data.  Decisions and processes happening more and more in real time.

In many ways, this is a very good thing.  This means you have more information to drive smarter decisions.  To drive business operations with more data.  You can really tighten relationships with your extended ecosystem by sharing data effectively.  You can respond in a more intelligent, more automated fashion to events as they arise.  But only if you are able to effectively integrate and manage all the data.

The flip side of this coin is that these very same trends can make data a complete nightmare to deal with.  If you have a complex integration hairball, you probably don’t have the flexibility in your architecture to deal with these new types and sources of data .   You may not have the infrastructure in place to address all the data quality issues that will abound.  Your business users, instead of being armed by all this data, will become overwhelmed by it.  Your costs will go up, and your quality and responsiveness will go down.

We have been talking a lot about the data driven enterprise.  One way to define a data driven enterprise is an organization that is able to ensure that data remains a valuable asset to the business, rather than becoming a major liability.   When we’ve asked for a show of hands at the World Tour, the majority of folks in the room indicated that their data is both an asset and a liability right now.  It’s clear that your data can really be a double-edged sword if you don’t have the methodology and technical foundation in place to manage it.

And often, even though we all say that data is one of our most important assets, data is really treated as though it were a liability.  Typically, the primary responsibility for integrating and managing data lies with the IT organization.  And most IT organizations are treated as cost centers.  John Schmidt has had some good postings on valuing data as an asset.  Would love to hear from you on what it will take to shift the mentality from data as a liability to data as an asset.