Informatica Perspectives

I am very fortunate to have a CIO role that extends beyond the traditional responsibilities of IT. Part of my role includes the strategy and implementation of the recently launched Informatica Marketplace.

The Informatica Marketplace has generated a lot of buzz with our customers and partners. Last week while I was presenting at the Pacific Crest Annual Cloud Computing Conference I heard the excitement about our new offering from many of the attendees. Mostly, people appreciated our continued thought leadership and commitment to providing an open platform to host solutions for data integration, data quality and data management. And yes, it is an open platform to host solutions that not only support Informatica, but other vendors too - even competitors. Our fundamental belief is that the hand of free enterprise will ultimately win, so we are willing to provide an open platform to do so.

Here are a few questions I've heard and answered over the last few weeks: [Read more]

I ended 2009 blogging with my 2010 predictions. Now that we're in 2010, I'll begin the new year with resolutions we can all make to move our organizations forward - to become information driven. My purpose is to provide quick anecdotes that are actionable so you can see immediate results.

1. Ask your IT applications manager to profile the customer data in two or three systems such as sales, marketing and your customer portal. Ask the IT person to quantify the quality of the information in each one. For example, how many duplicate contacts are there, how many customers are not ‘mailable' or ‘emailable', how many contacts are missing critical information for sales effectiveness. Once you have that information and know the quality of your data, you can accurately make the business case for what your bad data is costing you. This should result in helping secure the funding necessary to address these issues. [Read more]

What type of blog would this be if I didn't end the year with my 2010 predictions?

To begin on a positive note, IT budgets will go up in 2010 after a global average 4-5% decrease in 2009. In many respects, however, 2010 will be even more difficult on IT than 2009. How can I say this if budgets are increasing? Doesn't this mean we will have more money to throw at nagging issues?

In general, most IT organizations have deferred maintenance on many core infrastructure and application items. For example, in the past, several of my peers would automatically refresh laptops at the three-year mark. I know many of them have extended this to five years. Even though the deferred hardware upgrades had a positive net impact on the budget, it was an increase in IT burden to manage old equipment as the "meantime between failures" increases. Now they are looking to upgrade these boxes. This is true for networks, phone systems, servers, applications… (How many of you are running Windows 2000 and need to upgrade?) [Read more]

As a CIO, I am a strong proponent of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and the components of EA articulated by Steven Spewak. Eight years ago, I would sit with the Informatica R&D Chief Architect and describe what I needed to realize our IT architectural vision, as well as the problems I wanted to overcome.

So, what were the problems I wanted addressed?

First, I am a believer of a best of breed strategy. I fundamentally believe the “megavendors” are dictating IT strategy, yet they cannot innovate fast enough – thereby harming IT. To build a best of breed approach, I wanted to build a loosely coupled architecture. In essence, I wanted to abstract the data away from the applications we ran, thereby enabling me to switch vendors if necessary. This would enable me to provide the best solutions to our business as well as maintain negotiating leverage with my vendors. The challenge is that no technology existed to do this cost effectively. [Read more]

Many of us are familiar with the role of IT Enterprise Architecture (EA)…how it defines the architectural blueprints for an organization. From my perspective, I’ve opted to use the analogy of city planning rather than the plans for a building.

I believe a city plan is much more analogous to how we build IT. How so? Buildings are like applications, each with plans for construction. To construct the building, you go through city planning and the building department. Those departments ensure the structure will be built to set standards. Although buildings may look different or have different functions, they fundamentally must follow the set guidelines. [Read more]

Last week, I had the good fortune of hosting breakfasts for CIOs and senior IT executives in both Toronto and New York. The CIOs represented a cross section of industries and government agencies. They also represented medium-sized enterprises up to the Fortune 500. Joining me on this trip was the CIO from Microstrategy, Peng Xiao, who also shares the passion for leveraging information to establish a sustainable competitive advantage within an organization.

Our objective was to facilitate good collaborative discussions and build strong peer relationships with our respective customers. From our experience, a lot of vendors are "coin operated" and want to talk to you when you need to buy. Philosophically, we are working to establish partnerships through mutual shared experiences. [Read more]

The main challenge with being information driven is the governance of the data. Let's start with a simple example that illustrates this point. You have contact data in several systems in your enterprise. Consider three groups, sales, marketing and support, all who are constantly updating customer data. Can anyone update address? If an address is updated by two systems, which one takes precedence? Is it simply a timestamp or the role of the person who did the update? What happens if a customer updates their address on a portal, should they take priority? What happens if they use a home address and not a business address? Who can update the contact name? What name do you use to address the contact? How do you define what a unique contact is? Is it based on email address? [Read more]

I’m going to take a brief hiatus from my blog on information driven business and focus for a moment on cloud computing. This is a widely discussed topic amongst many IT circles due to the attractiveness of the offerings.

In general, what’s so attractive? Why are IT professionals embracing cloud computing?

First, there is barely any capital requirement to get started. Literally for $0.10/hour, you can have your own server running an application. At Informatica, we have cloud instances running and have witnessed the nominal costs for compute power and storage. [Read more]

Being information driven is as much an organizational commitment as it is a technology commitment. The following outlines the major components required to be information driven.

Data Governance (DG) – DG is the overarching program for a data driven company. In my last blog, I defined DG as the practice of managing data as a corporate asset across the enterprise. It involves the processes, policies, standards, organization, and technologies required to manage and ensure the availability, accessibility, quality, consistency, auditability, and security of data in a company or institution.

Who should own DG? In most things we do, we look for the single point of accountability. In this instance, I recommend a collective structure of senior business managers who are accountable for the data subjects that drive your business. Additionally, I suggest a senior member of IT who can drive change across IT systems. [Read more]

The first thing I would like to do is dispel a myth that many people believe. That is, being information-enabled or competing with data means analytics or BI. This is only partially true.

Analytics is one of the methods an organization uses to compete on information. For example, with analytics you can analyze buying behavior and leverage the information to better promote products. To truly be information-enabled, an organization must control the information across operational (transaction) systems as well as analytic solutions.

In the world of analytics, most organizations invest a significant amount of time and effort cleansing data from operational systems before it moves into a data warehouse. Thus, enabling higher quality analytics where reporting can be performed. However, the "cleansing" effort is rarely reflected back into the source/operational systems. This plays into the unwritten rule of IT that bad data doubles at the rate of good data. [Read more]