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Business intelligence critical to surviving recession

 
Content starts here Stay competitive in today’s economy by maximizing business intelligence
In these challenging economic times, maximizing business intelligence to improve decision making, increase efficiency and productivity is now an imperative. So much so that growth for software and services required to deliver master data management (MDM), information quality management (IQM), and information governance (IG) services is slated to grow at double the software market overall. This is no surprise to those familiar with HP’s BI Maturity Model, which charts an organization’s adoption of business intelligence (BI) along a maturity curve.

Bumps in the road on the BI journey

The HP BI Maturity Model shows that in Stage I, organizations use BI for ad hoc departmental solutions that help them run the business. In Stage II, they become more sophisticated and use BI to measure and monitor the business. As their use of BI expands into Stage III, organizations want to integrate their BI assets and manage them with a larger view of the business, an enterprise view. But often, firms cannot move forward because they have too many information silos; they can’t trust the quality of their data; they can’t look across business units, and they lack the governance models to manage their information as a program.

Enter MDM, information quality, and information governance. These strategic information domains address the four categories of fundamental roadblocks companies face at Stage III:

  • First is poor data quality. Because of inaccurate, inconsistent or incomplete data, there are too many versions of the truth.
  • Second is an inability to look across business units to realize a complete view of information relationships, for example, all the relationships an organization might have with a customer.
  • Third is the need to take cost out of operations and run the business efficiently, which is aggravated by a proliferation of redundant BI tools and applications.
  • Fourth is the lack of trust in the integrity of data supporting regulatory and compliance mandates.

Using MDM, IQM and IG as enablers on the BI journey

Because organizations lack confidence in their data and can’t look across the whole information value chain, enterprise data management can compromise an organization’s ability to make decisions, understand and serve their customers, make the right investments, and manage risk. As a result, they can’t really derive the value they should from the considerable investments they’ve made in their CRM, BI and ERP applications.

That’s where the bump in the road at Stage III of the BI Maturity Model becomes a roadblock—a wall that organizations need to scale in order to move on. HP’s 2009 Top Ten Trends in Business Intelligence analysis cites data integration as a growing focused area for organizations with first-generation data infrastructures that cannot support second-generation BI environments. In other words, organizations are seeking software and services to help them evolve to the next stage of their BI journey.

MDM, IQM and IG are interrelated services from HP that help organizations realize the full value of their BI investments. These services provide the reliable, accurate source of data for making better decisions, enabling the enterprise view for a complete view of relationships, reducing risk through improved data integrity and governance, and introducing efficiency by eliminating redundant systems and processes. MDM, IQM and IG make the data work for the business.

Once past these enterprise data management limitations, an organization is poised to become a business that is empowered by its information and harnessing the potential to really transform the business. That’s Stage IV of the BI Maturity Model, where organizations operationalize their BI as a mission-critical application and a driver of strategic agility. At HP, we take a holistic view of MDM, IQM and IG, integrating strategy and implementation methodologies across the three disciplines to recognize their interdependency. We pair that with deep data integration and warehousing credentials to help organizations execute the most complex data strategy. And finally, we offer an unbiased tool selection process for MDM, IQM IG and data integration tools that is driven by customer needs. We’re there to help you get past the roadblocks on that bumpy BI evolutionary road and realize the full value of your BI investment.

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What drives the need for MDM, information quality management and information governance initiatives?

Poor data quality
Data is inaccurate, inconsistent or incomplete. The cost and lost opportunity associated with this dirty data is staggering. For example, quality time and money can be wasted on customer profile validation, duplicate or undeliverable mailings, or redundant advertising.

Inability to realize an enterprise view Organizations want to look across business units at the whole information chain to understand the complete customer relationship. The problem is that they have hundreds, maybe thousands, of information silos. Across those silos, they have no common definitions of fundamentals in their businesses. They can’t look across business units, much less globally, to understand their business operations.

Drive for information management efficiency
As BI tools and repositories expand across the organization, redundant systems and processes proliferate. Poor information management hobbles functional processes like procurement or customer relationship management.

Managing risk and compliance
Clear data lineage and auditability of information is a requirement to simplify legal discovery and meet demands in a heightened regulatory environment. Good information quality is needed to provide the necessary data lineage.