Informatica Perspectives

In Chris Cingrani's recent post the question: "Data quality, does anyone care?" was posed. The answer is yes, of course people care about data quality – in fact, there are a lot of good reasons why a lot of people should care very deeply about data quality. Let’s look at the most recent example of where data quality makes a big difference, and that is in the federal election process. [Read more]

Over the last few months, I have had a number of discussions with clients at various stages of planning a data quality initiative. Some clients are just starting to take the data quality plunge, while others are evaluating how to leverage the successes of past projects into building out a formal data governance initiative. When I start talking to clients about their goals around data quality, I often start with the same basic question, regardless of where they fall from a maturity process around data quality. The question is simply – does the business care?

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I recently participated in two DMRadio shows that were aired within a week of each other—the first show focused on MDM, the second on data governance.  Not surprisingly, the topics overlapped tremendously.  In fact, during the MDM show, I found myself talking primarily about the need to establish a data governance program to ensure the organizational and process alignment necessary for successful MDM deployments.  And on the data governance show, part of the conversation centered on MDM being a very common driver behind the launch of data governance programs.

While they are two separate concepts, they are closely linked.  MDM is the more concrete of the two: technology is implemented, data is cleansed, reconciled and shared, and there is a direct impact on business processes.  In other words, MDM is the yang.  Data governance can seem more abstract, focusing on aligning process and people to ensure an organization is maximizing the value of its data.  Data governance is the yin.  In accordance with the principle of balancing yin and yang, MDM and data governance each bring something to the table, and they are each improved by the other.  Dave Waddington from the Information Difference also comments on this interrelationship in this recent posting on their data governance survey.

If you are contemplating one without the other, perhaps it’s time to meditate a bit on the value of the two together.

Alan Greenspan stated last week that poor data quality is part of the reason for today’s financial crisis. As many businesses have already learned, databases are only as accurate as the information fed into them. [Read more]

This blog post is part two of an ongoing series highlighting the importance of data in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I look forward to hearing your thoughts and input on the subject.

I'm back. It's been a little longer than normal, longer than I would have liked. Perhaps that’s because 'addressing SOA's data-centric pitfalls' isn’t easy. (Really it’s because I’ve been working on other things. But let’s get back to the topic at hand.)

One of the benefits of the SOA approach is the ability to think top-down about problems. The usual approach is to work tightly with the business to define your processes from a business perspective, leading to clearly defined services that the business understands and you can implement together.

This is wonderful and has a clarifying symmetry that Software Engineering has been trying to achieve since the days of CASE. But now, here we are in 2008 with the SOA standards defined and the tools available to potentially achieve this vision. Ah, finally, the integration hairball will be contained and life will improve immeasurably for all!

But as I talked about last time, one of the reasons that things aren’t that simple is the data-centric pitfalls. And addressing this problem is not easy if you want to take a long-term, enterprise-oriented approach.

In talking with folks who have walked down this path, struggled with data problems, and are trying to think holistically about a workable longer-term solution, three themes come up again and again: [Read more]

If banks and financial institutions had invested in more data integration and business intelligence tools to spot issues arising within their portfolios, could they have avoided the recent credit mess?

Perhaps, to a degree. But it is human beings that are ultimately making the risk judgments, and oftentimes, bad decisions may have looked good at the time they were made.

Still, technology has improved to the point where troubles could have been more effectively flagged. [Read more]

I find this rather an interesting and profound question!  Trusted data.  What does this mean, and how does it affect us all?  We've built all these systems over the years and we implicitly trust that the data provided is correct.

For years I have used online banking and I trust my bank (well, things have been OK up to now and I always check my statements and cross-reference incomings and outgoings).  Why do I check it - basically because I'm still a little nervous, it makes sense and I hear horror stories about hacking, stolen identities and all sorts of security issues.  The latest high profile example of this of course was the Sarah Palin hack (take a look at View From The Bunker for an interesting blog on security).

We make decisions all the time based on trust.  We buy presents for our loved ones, or cars and houses because we think we have enough funds - we trust our data.  I was chatting to a journalist recently over at the Oralce Openworld conference and he brought up the word trust … apparently he was using a very popular on-demand service (you know … the gorilla in the market!) to sell to customers and wasn't able to reconcile with his finance people.  They were telling him that his top 10 customers were completely different to the top ten in his SaaS system.  Hmm … a great example of "which data do you trust"?  The CRM system , or the finance system?  After investigation he found out that the problem was because the two systems were not connected and his company was relying on human process to update both systems.

That's the whole point of integration - to help ensure that your systems are connected and that the right information is available to you to help you improve your decision making process, and operate more effectively.  Today data is the lifeblood of every company, it's the true currency that we all deal in when we trade on the stock exchanges, or run drug trials across hospitals, or manage supply chains across continents.  You have to be able to trust your data - and yet the world is full of examples of mistakes made or mishaps occuring because of poor quality data.

Take a look at "Do You Trust Your Data?". It's a new site we've pushed out highlighting real-world examples of stories relating to trusting your data.  You can add your own (anonymously if you'd like).   We've love to hear from you.  Go on… I know you want to

Years, ago, I came across this question in an article in Boardroom Reports:  "What do you call a hamburger that’s 99% meat and 1% garbage?"

The answer was a "garbageburger." In other words, even if a small fraction of the burger is tainted, the whole meal is tainted. The original analogy was being used to illustrate the challenges of time management, but it's an apt analogy for data environments as well. That is, if a portion of the information is bad or unreliable, trust in all the data eventually breaks down. In essence, many implementations of service-oriented architecture (SOA) taking place across companies may be garbageburgers because they are serving up unreliable information – an element that has been out of the control of SOA designers.

Sorry if I ruined anyone’s lunch, but the point had to be made. [Read more]

I was delighted to see last week a couple of industry awards won by our customers.  It's always nice to hear about such things, because I think it's a testament to the value we deliver to our customers.

The first award went to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) at the annual UK 2008 CNET Networks awards.  They won "Financial Services Technology Project of the year" award with a project called "SPOT" (Shared Product Opportunity Tool).

"With SPOT, RBS overhauled its client management to drive profitability and success through the development of a collaboration network".

The judges said: “RBS implemented a new system to integrate client information previously held on disparate corporate and investment banking systems. We were impressed by the implementation’s ability to increase sales opportunities exponentially.” 

The second award went to telecoms giant KPN who were awarded top spot at the Ventana Research 2008 Leadership awards for the Information Management Awards category. 

“By introducing the 360-degree view of our customers and providing clean, trusted data in near real-time, Informatica is helping KPN raise the bar in terms of customer satisfaction, target customers with compelling cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and reduce marketing and sales time to market" said Thomas Reichel, Senior IT Architect, KPN

Jan Muchez, CIO, KPN added, “Informatica products and services have been critical to driving shareholder value through improved customer service. To realize our strategic innovation goals, we built our customer data cleansing platform with Informatica soft ware; it gives us real-time cleansing and standardization of our customer data.”

If you're interested in reading more about how KPN is using Informatica, please visit our knowledge center 

We take great pride in the value our customers obtain from our solutions and I would like to congratulate both RBS and KPN on winning these prestigious industry awards.  Well done to you both!

If you would like to see more about the success our customers are obtaining from using Informatica please visit our knowledge center on the Informatica website.

A blog at IT-Director.com caught my eye yesterday.  Entitled "IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualization" it included the following comment:

“For Cloud computing, chief amongst these concerns is the readiness of commercial organisations to trust significant proportions of their essential, and hence incredibly valuable, corporate information to platforms and suppliers over whom they have little control and who might hold the data wherever they wish. Such a leap of faith is today beyond consideration in many business scenarios.”

This is spot-on.  There is so much talk about "cloud computing this, and cloud computing that".  When it comes to corporations there are many examples of outsourcing non-core business processes to the cloud.  Here at Informatica we use over 17 different services ourselves. I'd say the most mission-critical of these is our email marketing system (can't tell you who or I'd have to shoot you!).  We're rolling it out worldwide across our marketing team and have spent the last few months integrating it with our own on-premise CRM system, contact hub and datawarehouse.  Not a trivial task but incredibly important for me (well, I'm a marketeer) but probably less mission-critical to our CFO!

At the end of the day corporations WILL move data into the clouds so whilst I agree with Tony in the above-mentioned article, I also disagree with him (OK, bit of a split personality here now).  I agree that it is foolish to simply “go to the clouds”, but I disagree about the state of the industry.  It is possible to keep the data secure and we, amongst others, have proven that with our on-demand integration service.  It is also possible to integrate such services into core business processes.  My statement would be - don't overlook the integration. You do it at your peril.  We've had a LOT of experience of helping companies do this effectively - after all we're the data integration company!

Oh … and we can do it from in the clouds too