Tag Archives: business value
Ten Facets of Data Governance
In this video, Rob Karel, vice president of product strategy, Informatica, outlines the Informatica Data Governance Framework, highlighting the 10 facets that organizations need to focus on for an effective data governance initiative:
- Vision and Business Case to deliver business value
- People
- Tools and Architecture to support architectural scope of data governance
- Policies that make up data governance function (security, archiving, etc.)
- Measurement: measuring the level of influence of a data governance initiative and measuring its effectiveness (business value metrics, ROI metrics, such as increasing revenue, improving operational efficiency, reducing risk, reducing cost or improving customer satisfaction)
- Change Management: incentives to workforce, partners and customers to get better quality data in and potential repercussions if data is not of good quality
- Organizational Alignment: how the organization will work together across silos
- Dependent Processes: identifying data lifecycles (capturing, reporting, purchasing and updating data into your environment), all processes consuming the data and processes to store and manage the data
- Program Management: effective program management skills to build out communication strategy, measurement strategy and a focal point to escalate issues to senior management when necessary
- Define Processes that make up the data governance function (discovery, definition, application and measuring and monitoring).
For more information from Rob Karel on the Informatica Data Governance Framework, visit his Perspectives blogs.
The Inches We Need Are Everywhere
So goes the line in the 1999 Oliver Stone film, Any Given Sunday. In the film, Al Pacino plays Tony D’Amato, a “been there, done that” football coach who, faced with a new set of challenges, has to re-evaluate his tried and true assumptions about everything he had learned through his career. In an attempt to rally his troops, D’Amato delivers a wonderful stump speech challenging them to look for ways to move the ball forward, treating every inch of the field as something sacred and encouraging them to think differently about how to do so.
The Value of Knowing the Value
Ever wondered if an initiative is worth the effort? Ever wondered how to quantify its worth? This is a loaded question as you may suspect but I wanted to ask it nevertheless as my team of Global Industry Consultants work with clients around the world to do just that (aka Business Value Assessment or BVA) for solutions anchored around Informatica’s products.
How far will your investment stretch?
As these solutions typically involve multiple core business processes stretching over multiple departments and leveraging a legion of technology components like ETL, metadata management, business glossary, BPM, data virtualization, legacy ERP, CRM and billing systems, it initially sounds like a daunting level of complexity. Opening this can of worms may end up in a measurement fatigue (I think I just discovered a new medical malaise.) (more…)
Data Virtualization Quick Tips
The ability to create abstract schemas that are mapped to back-end physical databases provides a huge advantage for those enterprises looking to get their data under control. However, given the power of data virtualization, there are a few things that those in charge of data integration should know. Here are a few quick tips.
Tip 1: Start with a new schema that is decoupled from the data sources. (more…)
Dear Santa…
Back in the good ol’ days, Santa Claus received letters and post cards from children all over the world. When telephones and faxes became commonplace, they were also used to contact Santa. In addition to those traditional methods, children today can also use the internet to send emails, Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn to notify Santa of their wish list. (more…)
(Data) Champions Are Everywhere
I recently had the opportunity to meet with the board of directors for a large distribution company here in the U.S. On the table for discussion were data quality and data governance, and how a focus on both could help the organization gain competitive advantage in the market. While I was happy to see that this company had tied data quality and data governance to help meet their corporate objectives, that’s not what caught my attention. Instead, what impressed me the most was how the data quality and data governance champion had effectively helped the rest of the board see that there WAS a direct link, and that with careful focus they could drive better business outcomes than they could without a focus on data at all. As it turns out, the path to success for the champion was to focus on articulating the link between trusted data — governed effectively — and the company’s ability to excel financially, manage costs, limit its risk exposure and maintain trust with its customers. (more…)
Building A Business Case For Data Quality: The Steps
Building A Business Case For Data Quality, 3 of a 7-part series
Let’s look at the steps in more detail for building a business case for data quality using the bottom-up approach. Where do you start? You need to find a sponsor—someone who instinctively knows there is a problem and wants help in quantifying it. Marketing knows it has duplicate customer records and wants to get a better handle on them. You should look at these systems or business processes that work with the customer data. You must assess how the data in these systems is used within marketing. For example, what is the data used for, what critical decisions are made based on this data, and how many people use it to make decisions? The more users or the more critical the decision, the more likely this data is a candidate for evaluation. Also look at more than the initial decision support system and data. Look at any systems that get data from the decision support system. Data flow diagrams are always helpful in assessing this but usually difficult to find. (more…)
Understanding The Need for Quality Master Data
Of my recent series of papers on the value of data quality improvement, the first focused on the economic or financial aspects of data quality improvement. One of the goals of the paper was to show that if you iteratively drill down along the different economic value dimensions to look at the use of information that contributes to organizational success, you can establish a link between data failures and business or operational process success. For example, when looking at cost reduction as the high level value dimension, we see that when attempting to reduce the spend associated with particular products through better negotiations with vendors, duplicate product entries in the supplier catalog reduced the ability to do accurate review of costs of each item as well as classes of items. This inconsistency impacted the ability to achieve the cost reductions.
Inaugural Gartner MDM Summit In London A Major Hit
Europe might have started a little later than the U.S. with master data management, but if the inaugural Gartner MDM Summit for EMEA is any indication, it’s catching up quickly. Well over 350 registrants attended the event in London in early February, with strong representation from the UK, France, the Netherlands and other EMEA countries. Gartner Research VP Andrew White called the event a “major hit,” and I have to agree. (more…)
Life In The Fast Lane: Using Data Quality For Accelerated Results
As Bay Area commutes go, I consider mine to be on the long side. At roughly 60 miles each way, I can expect to be in my car for a while depending on what time of day I make the journey to or from the office. As is often the case, I take the time I have in my car to think about work and the various items that consume my inbox on any given day.
During a drive home late last week, I was pondering some thoughts I had on how to articulate the ROI of good data quality. As commutes tend to go sometimes, this day was particularly frustrating so I had some extra time on my hands to think things through. As I sat at a standstill for what seemed like an eternity, it dawned on me that the carpool lane was, for the most part, completely empty. After briefly contemplating the utility of the very high fine associated with jumping into the empty carpool lane, I realized that the flow of traffic at that particular moment was a good example of how data often flows throughout an organization.