Tag Archives: ROI
A key growth milestone for the Informatica Marketplace
Recently, the Informatica Marketplace reached a major milestone: we exceeded 1,000 Blocks (Apps). Looking back to three years ago when we started with 70 Blocks from a handful of partners, it’s an amazing achievement to have reached this volume of solutions in such a short time. For me, it speaks to the tremendous value that the Marketplace brings not only to our customers who download more than 10,000 Blocks per month, but also to our partners who have found in the Marketplace a viable route to market and a great awareness and monetization vehicle for their solutions.
There has been a lot of discussion around the explosion of data and what it means to companies trying to leverage this extremely valuable resource. Informatica has a huge part to play in helping customers solve those problems not only through the technologies we provide directly, but through the tremendous ecosystem that we have built through our partners. The Marketplace has grown to more than 165 unique partner companies, and we’re adding more every day. Blocks such as BI & Analytics sing Social Media Data from Deloitte, and Interstage XWand – XBRL Processor from Fujitsu represent offerings from large, established software companies, while Blocks such as Skybot Enterprise Job Scheduler and Undraleu Code Review Tool from Coeurdata are solutions that have been contributed by earlier stage companies that have experienced significant success and growth. It has been a pleasure helping these companies to grow and reach new customers through the Marketplace.
One of the most exciting things about reaching the 1K Block milestone is not just the amount of companies that are on the Marketplace, but the amount of solutions that have been contributed from our developer community. Blocks such as Autotype Excel Macro, Execute Workflow, and iExportNormalizer are all solutions that Informatica developers have built because it helps them in their daily activities, and through the Marketplace they have found a way to share these valuable assets with the community. In fact, over half of our solutions are free to use, which is a ringing endorsement of the power of the community and a great way to try out any number of useful solutions at no risk. By leveraging enabling technologies such as Informatica’s Cloud Platform as a Service, developers can create and share solutions more quickly and easily than ever before.
Overall, it has been an exciting ride as the Marketplace has rocketed to 1,000 Blocks in under three years, and I look forward to what the next three years has in store!
Why Big Data Leaders are Made and Not Born
There are organizations truly reaping the rewards of Big Data, and then there are those who are just trying to catch up. What are the Big Data “leaders” doing that the “laggards” are missing? (more…)
Asset in, Garbage Out: Measuring data degradation
Following up on the discussion I started on GovernYourData.com (thanks to all who provided great feedback), here’s my full proposal on this topic:
We all know about the “Garbage In/Garbage Out” reality that data quality and data governance practitioners have been fighting against for decades. If you don’t trust data when it’s initially captured, how can you trust it when it’s time to consume or analyze it? But I’m also looking at the tougher problem of data degradation. The data comes into your environment just fine, but any number of actions, events – or inactions – turns that “good” data “bad”.
So far I’ve been able to hypothesize eight root causes of data degradation. I’d really love your feedback on both the validity and completeness of these categories. I’ve used similar examples across a number of these to simplify. (more…)
Build A Prioritized Data Management Roadmap
In my recent white paper, “Holistic Data Governance: A Framework for Competitive Advantage”, I aspirationally state that data governance should be managed as a self-sustaining business function no different than Finance. With this in mind, last year I chased down Earl Fry, Informatica’s Chief Financial Officer, and asked him how his team helps our company prioritize investments and resources. Earl suggested I speak with the head of our enterprise risk management group … and I left inspired! I was shown a portfolio management-style approach to prioritizing risk management investment. It used an easy to understand, business executive-friendly visualization “heat map” dashboard that aggregates and summarizes the multiple dimensions we use to model risk . I asked myself: if an extremely mature and universally relevant business function like Finance manages its business this way, can’t the emerging discipline of data governance learn from it? Here’s what I’ve developed… (more…)
Data Governance: How Immature Can You Be?
No organization begins to implement a data governance program from an entirely blank slate; every organization likely has some capabilities to leverage. Determining an organization’s current level of data governance maturity is a useful and necessary first step in developing a customized plan that is both relevant and executable. So how do you assess your maturity? Well throw a rock in any direction and you’re likely to hit a software vendor, consulting company or industry analyst that offers a maturity model and assessment tool to support your data management and data governance efforts. Actually don’t throw rocks, you could hurt somebody. (Yes, we offer one too – more on that below). (more…)
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.
Building the Business Case for Big Data: Learn to Walk Before You Run
In a recent webinar, Mark Smith, CEO at Ventana Research and David Lyle, vice president, Product Strategy at Informatica discussed: “Building the Business Case and Establishing the Fundamentals for Big Data Projects.” Mark pointed out that the second biggest barrier that impedes improving big data initiatives is that the “business case is not strong enough.” The first and third barriers respectively, were “lack of resources” and “no budget” which are also related to having a strong business case. In this context, Dave provided a simple formula from which to build the business case:
Return on Big Data = Value of Big Data / Cost of Big Data (more…)
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 Process Stages of Data Governance
To truly manage data as a valued enterprise asset, data governance must be managed as a business function like finance or human resources. A finance function is comprised of multiple core business processes such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll and financial planning. So to manage data governance as a function, what are the core business processes that comprise data governance? (more…)
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…)