Tag Archives: Data Governance
Whose Fault Is The Integration Hairball?
The integration hairball is a pattern that is repeated over and over again in virtually every organization. The hairball is characterized by an overly complex collection of dependencies between application components that is hard to change, expensive to maintain, and unpredictable in operation.
I have used the graphic below since 2001 to present a visual image of the hairball. It shows a collection of enterprise applications as boxes with lines representing the information exchanges between them. I use this picture as an example of an anti-pattern whenever I present to audiences of IT professionals about Lean Integration or ICCs. As soon as the image flashes up on the screen, the first reaction I get – anywhere around the world – is “how did you get a picture of our environment”. (more…)
Unique Identification and Unique Identifiers
A major challenge in data quality and in master data management is the ability to uniquely identify a specific entity and/or differentiate one entity from another. In a perfect world, we would be able to depend on three assertions to simplify the task: (more…)
Keeping Your MDM Initiative Lean
Human behavior studies show that if you are offered a pizza menu with a number of combination offerings as well as “build it yourself” options, you will order more toppings than if presented with a menu that only presents build it yourself. The same thing for medical tests – if a doctor is presented with a pre-filled in menu of recommended clinical tests for specific diseases (and the option to strike out tests that are not needed) they order more tests than if presented with the same order form but with nothing checked in advance. So what is the relevance for Master Data Management (MDM)? (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…)
Reflections On Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant For Data Quality Tools
Gartner recently released their 2011 Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools and I’m happy to announce that Informatica is positioned in the Leaders’ quadrant. We believe our position is a testament to the fact that customers like Station Casinos and U.S. Xpress continue to turn to Informatica to solve their most critical data quality challenges.
The publishing of the Magic Quadrant is often a great opportunity to reflect on the state of the data quality market. It should come as no surprise that data quality as a business imperative isn’t going away any time soon. We are continuing to see customers looking for help and expertise in solving a wide range of data quality problems, largely associated with data governance initiatives, master data management (MDM), business intelligence and application modernization. And the association of data quality in these areas is only getting stronger. (more…)
New Aberdeen Survey Confirms MDM’s Value For Customer Centricity
Some companies are achieving high customer satisfaction, increasing sales revenue, and reducing business and IT costs related to customer data. They’re improving internal productivity for sales, marketing and customer service while minimizing customer churn.
But other companies are not. They suffer high customer churn, poor productivity, and sluggish sales. When it comes to customer centricity, what differentiates best-in-class performers from the laggards? (more…)
With MDM, Customer Centricity Also Helps With Customer Privacy Compliance
Organizations considering master data management (MDM) to support customer centricity often focus on how MDM can help them attract and retain customers and drive revenue through a complete customer view. They also assess the productivity gains of sparing sales and service teams from hunting for customer data in disparate applications.
It’s important to consider another effect that MDM can have on your organization—enabling compliance with current and future consumer privacy regulations. (more…)
Building An Effective Business Case For MDM
If you work in IT, you’re aware of the many problems and challenges that bad data can pose for your organization. You know that master data management (MDM) and data quality could address a lot of those issues and give business users the timely and trusted data they need to operate effectively.
Your IT team can map out a plan to implement MDM to support a number of business processes and operations. Most commonly we see three major types of MDM business cases: (more…)
Want To Make Sure Your Customer Experience Work Stays On Track?
Manage these Seven Inhibitors of Customer Experience Work Success
1. Starting with a mantra, not an action plan.
- Often companies decide that they want to get some early traction by telling everyone to “focus on customer experience.” What happens next is that people realize this is a big corporate priority and begin making plans, creating new scorecards, and taking action.
- This proliferates the silo-based approach to actions that is contrary to the discipline of experience development and management. A lot of action occurs, executives get a “false positive” that action is occurring and traction is happening, but it eventually stalls out because the actions don’t tie together and aggregate up to improve complete end-to-end customer experiences. (more…)
Solving Customer Data Problems With MDM–Find Out How At The Customer Data Forum
Have you ever received an offer from a company for a product you already own? How about two identical offers for the same product… or even three offers? It’s not uncommon. With all the great applications for campaign management and customer relationship management (CRM) that companies have implemented, how do these costly mistakes keep happening? (more…)