Tag Archives: ROI
Adopting Salesforce CRM: The Importance Of Data Integration
Here is part two of my interview with Informatica’s Scott Geffre. Scott has led the CRM rollout at Informatica, helping the company migrate from Pivotal to salesforce.com. In the first half of our discussion, he spoke about evaluating TCO and some of the benefits of software as a service (SaaS) applications. In this post, Scott talks about the importance of cloud integration, the challenges of hand coding, and master data management (MDM). (more…)
The Benefits Of Business User Involvement In Data Quality Projects
Today, business users find it very difficult to get involved in data quality processes. They see bad data and they see the impact of bad data on business processes, but they feel powerless to resolve the issues. They request IT to address the issues, however IT is often very busy and sometimes data quality projects are seen to be “nice to haves” and not necessarily on any critical path.
To solve data quality issues, you must have the active participation of business users, as they are the ones who are impacted most by poor data quality, who know what the data should look like and who know which business rules need to be applied. More importantly, they are the ones responsible for building a business case for high quality data. In this white paper: Pervasive Data Quality: Extending Data Quality to All Stakeholders, All Data Domains, and All Applications you can read more on this. (more…)
Managing Data As An Asset (Part 1) – Putting A Price Tag On Data
It’s pretty common for those of us in the data management world to talk about managing data as an asset, just as you manage assets like equipment and capital. One trite but telling mental test that I’ve seen many times goes something like this:
“In your office you have a rare antique desk, an expensive computer, and a 50 cent CD that has the only list of your top 500 customers and their purchase history. If there’s a fire, which do you save?”
The answer is meant to be obvious (the CD, duh), illustrating the enormous business value intrinsic to your data. And most of us nod our heads and say “yes, data is a critical asset, and we should manage it that way.” In fact, this concept of maximizing the value of data is core to our upcoming Informatica 9 launch.
But it’s easy to say and hard to do, not least because it is seemingly impossible to quantify the value of data. If you can’t put a specific dollar figure on it, how can you know how much you need to invest in managing it?
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Defining The ROI For Data Integration
When I wrote the EAI book years ago, I never really focused on the business case for data integration, other than looking at the money being wasted in hand coding data flows between systems. Indeed, it was in the single digit billions then, worldwide. I’m sure it’s in the double digits now, despite the fact that great data integration technology exists these days.
So, if the benefit of data integration is so obvious, why do you need to create a business case, defining the ROI to justify the cost of the effort and the technology? The fact is that most major projects require them these days, considering that IT costs are much more controlled than they were a few years ago. Indeed, a CIO friend of mine has his staff create business cases for any project over $10,000, thus they are creating a lot of business cases there. (more…)
Integration Payback: Making the Business Case
A recent news release reported a 2,000% ROI resulting from a Data Quality Center of Excellence. How did Richard Trapp pull off this amazing feat? His answer caught me off guard when I asked him; “I never talk about data quality.” Pardon me? Isn’t that what you do? Richard’s response is that “Business people are not excited about good data quality. Business people are excited about good marketing, increased sales, supply chain efficiencies, and reduced order-to-cash cycles.”
By the way, you can meet Richard at the upcoming GIS. Visit www.globalintegrationsummit.com for more information about the event and how you too can learn to create compelling business cases. In the meantime, here are two secrets for how he did it. (more…)
Communicating the Value of Data Quality
Many of our customers express frustration that even though it is quite obvious how their business suffers from poor data quality, they find it difficult to convince their associates to invest in initiatives that correct the problems.
Earlier this year, we participated in Rob Karel’s Forrester research that addresses this issue. The resulting research paper is titled “A Truism for Trusted Data: Think Big, Start Small” and its getting a lot of interest. Recently, there was a nice writeup in Intelligent Enterprise where they interviewed Rob and also made mention of the Data Quality ROI calculator that we’ve developed by working alongside our customers.
The article states
While Forrester is often suspect of vendor-supplied calculators, the research firm lists Informatica as an example of a vendor that has taken an approach that matches Forrester’s bottom-up strategy. The Informatica Data Quality ROI Calculator enables customers “to capture and visualize the benefits of a data quality investment ” before that investment is made,” Forrester said.
The report is available from Forrester’s web site. It contains some nice examples of how customers have built a business case for justifying investment in Data Quality. If you would like to share some previous successes in building a Data Quality ROI, feel free to post a comment!