Thursday, August 6, 2009

Challenges in Managing Data are Growing

Challenges in Managing Data are Growing

We believe there has never been a more important time for companies to focus on how they manage the ever growing and ever more complex data. They now have more information and are conducting more integration between systems than ever before. The data management challenges businesses now face are formidable:

  • Mergers, acquisitions and globalization have brought about more rapidly changing technology environments. The technology adoption curve has now shifted from technology infrastructure and applications to information.
  • Most large organizations are highly federated, with decentralized systems and processes resulting in data management problems that are extremely complex - both from a technology and governance perspective.
  • There are large degrees of overlapping data among most organization’s systems. Data quality problems in one system may – or may not – be a problem in another. The distributed nature of this problem from an organizational perspective presents issues for traditional project delivery models.
  • Most organizations have spent the past decade removing their manual processes and automating the integration of their systems. Removing these controls can actually increase the risk of propagating poor information and can result in a greater chance of system failures without a well-defined architecture.
  • The biggest challenge with large-scale and complex technology change is the data. There is no choice but to fix the issues of the past – you can’t “start over”.