Enterprise Information Management: March 2010 Archives

CDI, MDM, DQ: Points to Ponder.....

Most of you must have already heard about the popular acronyms like CDI, MDM and DQ. In case, you haven’t, they are Customer Data Integration (CDI), Master Data Management (MDM), and Data Quality (DQ).

Let me start with definitions, and then try to explain the relationship among the acronyms.

Master Data Management (MDM) is a set of processes, and tools that deal with non-transactional reference / master / data entities of an organisation. MDM at an enterprise level ensures that master / reference data is collected, aggregated, de-duplicated, standardised, and arranged in a federated / centralised fashion. It is also called as Golden Source of Data in some organisations, and provides data services to downstream applications that use in transactions. In business terms, MDM offers a single source of Master data like customers, products, employees, regions, etc., along with their hierarchies, contact information and other attributes. Sometimes, the hierarchies are maintained in a chronological manner to reflect historical changes.
Customer data integration (CDI) is a set of processes, and tools that consolidate and manage customer information across source applications, which provide immense value to the users who seek the complete view of the customers.
Data Quality (DQ) is a set of tools and processes, such as profiling, scrubbing, standardisation, and de-duplication, to ensure that the quality of the data is appropriate for the business users to make decisions.
If you look at the interdependence of the above-mentioned acronyms, it shows MDM precedes CDI implementation. But for both MDM and CDI, we need DQ.
More later, on the business scenarios around the acronyms.....

Posted by KN Rao at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Abracadabra and Digital Content

“Abracadabra” as childhood this is related to something appearing in hand of magician by just uttering these words. Making something appear has always fascinated me since childhood be it magician in circus show or locating your lucky shirt when you need it most or now in professional world searching for content from huge data stored in digital format.

Yes I am referring to upcoming stream called “ediscovery”. This means process through which we can make things appear which are stored in computer or network for purpose of reproducing them as evidence in court of law. Law Instructed or Government backed ethical hacking also comes in preview of this domain

With new nature of frauds coming into our way and most of state governments working on laws to protect cyber crimes and ensure quality of output it becomes all the more important to focus on this stream.

Although “eDiscovery” has recently caught my attention and I am still thinking about this. To me it is more than technology. It deinately has some element of law, security and compliance all built into it. Though I am not a law expert but I can certainly pay attention to IT related issues where technology can be used

Few Scenarios which can boost this stream of work are:

1. With search coming into shape and latest technologies coming our way to perform advanced searches. It makes it possible to search digital content using advanced algorithms

2. Digital Data once written over network cannot be lost easily. Retention and Archiving Policies make sure that we can retrieve desired information back

As part of ediscovery all kind of data can be searched ranging from images, movies or text content. Emails and Chat Messages are another important source of information which can be required to search and reproduce.

This whole stream can be serviced with following services:

1. Data Analysis

2. Data Retrieval and Conversion

3. Scanning

4. Metatagging data for easy retrieval

5. Indexing and Processing of data

6. Exporting

7. Printing

8. Quality Control

9. Recognition of data

With lot of legality and complexity involved in this topic I intend to DISCOVER (and invent) more and write about it.

Any thoughts from your side?

Posted by Kapil Bajaj at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Open Source Wave

Imagine your wife defining daily time table for your lifestyle. What if someone has already prescribed on how you will work, how to party what to eat when to drive and when to relax. Ummmh I am sure we all will run for our life in that case
Freedom is something we all aim for. Human Philosophy urges us to aim to greater independence and distance itself from any kind of rules and boundaries
Even market forces have proved to world time and again that self managed markets are always poised for greater growth and new highs. Same is true for any business. We have seen Indian markets flourishing to new heights after Government of India gave freehand in 1992. Since nationalized banks have lost monopoly in markets or PSU have given space to private telecom operators customers have experienced new kind of market revolution working to their favor in India. Today we have lowest call rates for mobile in India.
We can extend same concept to IT industry, where defined interfacing standards among hardware vendors has lead to greater drive for introducing innovative products in marketplace. Same drive we can see coming our way in Software Industry through Open Source Community.
I just referred to “Open Source Community” drive which is motion since last 30 years with development of Unix. This has become more prominent since inception of internet with communities working towards creating useful tools and technologies.
From Small and Mid Sized companies’ perspective, it provides them with better cost saving options and large enterprises use them to free themselves from lock in of big IT vendors and develop better control over enterprise class applications.
Until recently Open Source Software are invariably associated with term “Free”. However it simply means that source code is available and users are free to modify software to suit their needs. Soon companies and institutions started associating business with this model. It is definitely money generating business model which is posing threat to established commercial platforms in application servers, portal server or content management solution space. However with the intensity of investments planned by IT service consumers it hints at another “commoditized” IT service capability in the pipeline. Another exciting side of the story is that the even mainstream IT Service Providers are looking forward to explore the benefits of open source software to control cost in large transformational programs. Open Source Solution stack is always solution option for pre project analysis exercise.
More precisely, Open Source Software provides four essential freedoms*:
·         The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
·         The freedom to study how the program works, and change it (freedom 1).
·         The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
·         The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)..
* As per GNU Public License Policy
Whatever end result may be I am sure this wave is being noticed and world would develop more interest and attention towards this cause in time to come.

Posted by Kapil Bajaj at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Advanced Analytics in Corporate Banking...

This is in continuation of the Advanced Analytics blog that appeared sometime ago. Here I tried to present a business scenario on how it is applicable for a well known space called Corporate Banking.
Let me highlight some of the aspects that are relevant for the Corporate Banking. We have lot of participants like Customer Relationships, Portfolio Managers, Product Managers, Regional Managers, Risk Managers, and Finance Managers, who are all interested in different aspects of the customer relationship. Everyone wants to understand their own piece of thing, wants different reports in an ever changing environment. But all are interested in digging through information that has single version of truth. Added to this complexity, in Corporate World, companies get acquired and sold quite frequently. This changes main information called customer hierarchy. Interest rate fluctuations, and currency conversions also keep changing.
On the stakeholders’ side, the Customer Relationship manager is interested in keeping his customers very happy, by selling more at lesser margins where possible. The Portfolio managers are interested in pushing their products but at higher margins. Product Managers are always interested in inventing new products; understand performance of the existing ones. Regional Managers are interested in seeing that their region is performing properly, across the portfolios, and how the funds are allocated to their regions, across portfolios and products. Risk Managers are interested in seeing that they sell to customers with high credit rating; constantly marking the collaterals to market; interested in understanding the overall exposure to individual customers; combining the credit ratings with collaterals and exposures. Finance Managers are interested in checking the existence of a positive spread on all the facilities extended to the customers; properly allocating the funds to facilities; properly calculating the cost of funds and apportioning the same; securitising the collaterals to minimise the risk. They will also be interested in understanding the services revenue coming from customers.
There is also a lot of dependency on external agencies in obtaining the customer’s credit ratings, and constantly changing hierarchies due to frequent buy-outs and sell-outs.
On the architectural front, all the stakeholders will be interested in analysis of daily transactions, periodical aggregates, facility to perform “What if” analysis, trend analysis, cross-sell & up-sell opportunities, provide 360 degree view of customers to understand the overall exposures, integrate all the facilities data to provide a unified picture etc.. etc..
To meet the interactive decision making capabilities, we need to provide Advanced Analytics in the form of a powerful OLAP, but at the same time, we need some data architecture to meet all the other requirements mentioned in the above paragraph. I want to call these are data areas / subject areas. The necessary subject areas are: latest transactions, master / reference data & hierarchies, periodical aggregates, historical transactions, historical aggregates and then finally the all powerful OLAP. Among the periodical aggregates, we need something called 360 degrees view of customers, covering all the facilities enjoyed and the collaterals provided by them.
Since this is finance area, we also need good mechanisms for reconciliation, adjustments and audit trail. We can think of Cognos TM1 for the powerful OLAP, or some BI appliances instead of an OLAP.

Posted by KN Rao at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Data is an asset

Data is an asset for an organization. We have heard this data management principle multiple times. It has been clichéd to the core but most organizations fail to understand the true meaning of this principle. Let me try and explain this by using an analogy. Let us take an equally clichéd analogy of a car to look at this principle from a new perspective.

    Let us assume that your organization’s data is equivalent to a car. You have a new car, you expect it to run smoothly with minimum resources, which it does, for some time, anyway. You use it day in and day out and it works. After a period, if you fail to provide due care, it starts to malfunction. It has a starting trouble. It starts giving less mileage. The paint starts to peel off, the upholstery stinks, and so on.
    What do you do if your car gets old and starts giving trouble? You buy a new one. As this is an analogy, the car is actually your organization’s data. But there is one rule that I failed to mention in the beginning, you can not change your car. You are stuck with it for your entire life. If it has starting trouble, you have to push it every time you want to go anywhere. If the neighbors give you not so favorable looks because of the exterior of your car, you have to endure it. If it costs you a fortune to provide tactical fixes which won’t last a month, you have to bear it.
    How you wish, you knew from the beginning, you were stuck with one car for life! You would have taken better care of the car! You would not be stuck with an old wreck!
    The organization has to live with the existing data that is there. It can not replace it simply because it is not feasible. All data managers know that the activities such as data cleansing are long drawn and expensive. No data manager would like to be stuck with data that costs a fortune to maintain; where all fixes are tactical and short-lived; where just to get the data to do routine work is an ordeal.
    All this can be remedied by understanding that the data is not only an asset but it is an irreplaceable asset. With robust data management practices and strong data governance processes, you can make your data go a long way.

Posted by Ajey Jayant Sudame at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)