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]

Komerční banka.

Fresh off a flight from London, Dave Schrader, our friend from Teradata, alerted me that our joint Teradata-Informatica customer, Komerční banka, a Société Générale bank, won the prestigious, EMEA Business Intelligence Award 2010 at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit!

In their press release,
http://www.kb.cz/en/com/press/releases/781.shtml

Pavel Čejka, Komerční banka Executive Director, Strategy and Finance, comments on the great benefits of BI: "I believe that one of the strengths of financial management at KB is the existence of a unified database and performance indicators, which are interconnected and focused not only on financial data, which I consider to be a matter of course, but also on business, product, risk, operating and other information."

Teradata and Informatica were highlighted as part of the first-class technologies in the project. It involved the implementation of user metadata and an information quality program. [Read more]

Over the last few months I have observed a variety of posts and discussions relating to managing data quality.   I thought it might be interesting to discuss how we are using our own software to help drive data quality across our company.  We are on a journey and I’d like to share our progress with you over the coming months.  Our goal, like yours, is to deliver trusted, relevant and timely data to all parts of
our business.

[Read more]

Data quality issues are like back pains…everyone has to deal with them at one point or another, and in many cases it requires some major surgery. The strategic use of data is critical, and is one of those things you have to put into hard dollars before people begin to take data quality seriously. Understanding the true cost of data quality issues provides a solid foundation of understanding around the business case for putting a good data quality program and core enabling technology in place to solve this problem.

There are two costs to consider: Operational inefficiencies and long-term consequences. [Read more]

Last Tuesday’s virtual launch of Informatica 9 was the most widely attended and covered Informatica event ever due in large part to our partners’ overwhelming support. Informatica’s partners proved themselves to be truly an extension of our own organization. Not only did we have record partner participation in the form of validating quotes for the event site and press releases that went out, our partners referred over 2,500 of their own customers to the launch event! This type of momentum is a great example of both the level of commitment we have worked to create within our network of partners and validation of the fact that our partners truly believe in the central objective of the Informatica 9 platform – to deliver relevant, trusted data when, where, and how it’s needed to support the changing needs of customers. 2009 has been a very successful year for Informatica, for the INFORM partner program and for the majority of our partner community. We look forward to the opportunities that 2010 will bring as we continue to build on the momentum created by the launch into the end of the year and beyond when we in the Alliances Organization will focus our efforts to fully enable our partner community to bring Informatica 9 to the market place through a combination of educational web seminars, demos, hands-on technical training and live events.

A customer commented on this to me the other day – "your data is your business".  Two meanings in one phrase and eloquently stating the modern world that we live in today.  We have evolved computing in many ways over the last 20 years.  Today, with the launch of Informatica 9, we are evolving the computing model one further time because, quite simply “Your data is YOUR business” and "Your data IS your business".

It’s your organization’s most important proprietary asset. Are you really managing it that way?

The answer for most companies is “No”. [Read more]

Since recently attending the Gartner MDM Summit, reading the latest report on MDM Trends from Forrester, and speaking with several customers, a few trends are starting to emerge:

• There is no one single technology that will help organizations solve all of their MDM challenges
• While some MDM products are supporting multiple domains, they are still either customer-centric or product-centric
• Analytical style of MDM is gaining in importance, and
• The common challenges across all data domains and hub styles are data integration and data quality

[Read more]

Many organizations have found that there are several key challenges as they attempt to improve the quality of their data to support all projects and all applications. Data quality technology does not always allow organizations to fix poor data. Why? [Read more]

On the 1^st October 2009, I participated in a webinar “The Right Way to Do Data Integration for Applications,” hosted by David S. Linthicum, a recognized expert in SOA, Cloud computing and Enterprise Application Integration. It was an event that was very well attended and generated a lot of interest from the attendees judging by the large number and quality of questions that were submitted. I recommend that you listen to the replay and download the associated white paper he wrote on that subject.

David covered some of the limitations he has encountered over the years with the way Enterprise Integration Application (EAI) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies deal with the integration of data, deployed in a SOA initiative. [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]