As organisations have grown, large or small often the immediate need has been to increase profits to keep shareholders happy, address customer needs to keep ahead of the competition and to meet regulatory needs as cost-effectively as possible, this has had the effect of pushing IT departments to adopt almost a reactionary approach to the managing of its business.
Quite naturally this has led to a situation where organisations have data housed in countless databases that:
I) Do not speak to each other
II) Often house data on the same clients, in many cases different data on the same clients
III) Are so old they do not have a scheme
IV) A lack of understanding on the cross-dependence of databases
V) Bottlenecks in performance
Its blatantly obvious to any business that understanding your organisations data, where it sits, how it flows and what is contained in every database can open up a host of benefits: improved operational efficiency, a single customer view, reduced regulatory exposure and cost, time and people savings on any new IT or business initiative.
It is also very clear each benefit would itself produce a strong return on investment, however, most organisations have yet to address this issue why?
In our opinion there are a host of reasons, all of which are understandable and in many cases, make sound business sense, competing priorities, cross business lines so no clear sponsor, no idea where to start, many of the older systems being used have no data scheme and the people who built it have left the business or have even retired which increases risk to any data project,
The purpose of this BLOG is to highlight an alternative approach to addressing the problem, delivering meaningful gains to key strategic projects in line with business demands whilst all the time moving towards the enterprise single data model.
My Conclusion
After countless meetings with Tier 1 financial institutions trying to persuade them that the achievements ICX4 has had at two of the world’s top multi-faceted financial institutions could be replicated across their business with little success other than some nice conversations that would initiate debate but eventually lead nowhere based on all the reasons highlighted in the introduction we needed to find a less complicated approach to addressing what is too often perceived as a mammoth task.
Our conclusion was simple, take our global business model and focus it on one problem at a time, minimising the risk of a complete architecture redesign whilst adding real value by addressing the next significant business challenge, then the next, then the next, populating the Master Data Model as we go.
Yes, this does mean the business is effectively agreeing our enterprise data model is the right approach, however, the risk of a complete leap of faith into the unknown is drastically reduced and business value is achieved almost immediately.
So how do you eat the enterprise data elephant? One bite at a time.
To find out more contact mark.sully@icx4.com or call 0203 872 6949