For Royal Bank of Canada, data management and customer data integration aren’t about the technology as much as they are about business strategy and information—and the change management processes that enable it.
» Read the story

Sun Microsystems is an early adopter of customer data integration (CDI) and its success has helped marketing improve target mailings and achieve much higher response rates. Sun attributes its CDI success to convincing the business side to take ownership of its data. And to measuring results from two perspectives—business value and IT development.
» Read the story

» See more Success Stories

 

Data Management Launch

A New and Improved SDLC

Building data management rigor into every IT project

Baseline’s Data Management Launch service provides you with the tactics necessary to improve day-to-day data management as part of every new application and IT project. This service enables you to incorporate data management processes into an existing System Development Lifecycle (SDLC), define job functions, and formalize data governance.

Data Management Launch not only prescribes improvements to existing data management processes—it diagnoses opportunities to incorporate these processes into regular implementation activities. Often, this means a combination of “top down”—establishing data governance as an ongoing framework—as well as “bottom up”—building data management activities into all new application and system releases.

» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline

Your Challenges

  • Investing in your data asset comparable to other corporate assets
  • Eliminating the opportunity cost of not delivering data to the business
  • Delivering enterprise data in a sustainable and repeatable way
  • Determing who owns the data—and the problems
  • Data management—a systems development practice, not an afterthought

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The Problem

Laying the groundwork to manage data as a corporate asset

Baseline often encounters companies who are mature in their data warehouse and BI capabilities, but less so when it comes to data management.

As CRM, ERP, and operational systems increasingly demand more data from more sources, your problem becomes less and less about the platform or the packaged application, and more about the processes for managing data.

Your challenge is more than deploying software. It’s about communicating what data management means within the context of your company’s strategies and culture, and prescribing the tactics for delivering data across your enterprise in a sustainable and repeatable way. It’s about institutionalizing data management activities and integrating them into new and existing project work.

If you’re encountering any of the situations below, then you’re ready to improve enterprise data management: .

  • Data is an afterthought for many new systems, resulting in rework, throw-away, or over investment.
  • High-profile systems are deemed failures due to bad data.
  • No one understands what data stewardship means—or what it entails.
  • Management needs “ammunition” to fund a data management effort.
  • A major regulatory compliance or customer-focused initiative is looming on the horizon.
  • Loose efforts around data governance, data stewardship, data quality, and data administration need to be connected and formalized.

Adding Data Management Activities to the SDLC Process

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The Baseline Approach

Incremental tactical steps to incorporate data management as part of your SDLC

Baseline believes that a rigorous, culture-specific, and deliberate process to integrating data management as part of the SDLC is the best way to make data management a sustained development practice. This involves not only an assessment of a company’s existing development methods, but understanding specific business opportunities and pending strategic initiatives that mandate clean, integrated information for successful delivery.

The Data Management Launch service provides the foundation for rolling out data management as part of every new project effort. It examines your existing development processes and determines the gaps in data management. It delivers a set of recommended improvements, followed by a roadmap of data deployment initiatives that correspond to business needs.

Data Management Launch involves five key areas of analysis:

  • Development and Release Processes
  • Data Management Functions
  • Requirements Processes
  • Data Management Organizations and Job Roles
  • Existing Systems of Record
  • Management Buy-in and Culture Support

At the conclusion of a Data Management Launch engagement, you will have a set of moving forward recommendations, a new deployment lifecycle, discrete descriptions of functional roles, and a roadmap for rolling out formalized data management and governance processes.

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Your Value

Economies of scale and development cost savings

The Data Management Launch service helps IT organizations get a data management function off the drawing board and into place. It can establish data as a critical success factor for new or high-profile applications. It provides proof that good data management establishes economies of scale and development cost savings for IT systems development and maintenance projects.

An incremental approach to data management, as advocated by Data Management Launch, renders data management adoption more palatable to senior executives and business users who share funding of data provisioning for key applications. The service cements the notion that data management is not just a data warehouse or CRM activity, but that it should be part of every new development and release effort.

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Why Baseline

Helping smart companies make data management a sustained development practice

Baseline understands that an organization’s data supply chain mandates not only executive oversight, but ongoing processes and accountability metrics. In our data delivery and integration projects, we outline the functions necessary to ensure data quality, ownership, and ongoing governance are built into the integrated data you deploy to the business in a controlled and sustainable way.

Baseline’s projects begin and end with information—its ownership and its oversight are critical pieces to your company’s information strategy.

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To request more information, contact us via e-mail or call us at 1-818-906-7638.
 

September 16, 2008. Business Objects Webcast. EIM: Strategy, Best Practices, and Technologies on Your Path to Success with Frank Dravis.

September 18, 2008. DM Review/IBM Webinar. The Data Quality Assessment: Improving Performance Management With Information You Can Trust with Frank Dravis.

September 22, 2008. IDQ Conference, San Antonio. How to Use Six Sigma to Improve Data Quality & Quantify Data Quality Improvement with Joy Medved.

September 29-October 1, Initiate Exchange, Scottsdale.

October 23, 2008. TechTarget Seminar, Detroit. Master Data Management For The Enterprise with Jill Dyché and Evan Levy.

October 28, 2008. TechTarget Seminar, San Diego. Master Data Management For The Enterprise with Jill Dyché and Evan Levy.

» See our full schedule
 

Bigger Than the Data Warehouse: Launching Your Information Center of Excellence. How’s your BI Competency Center doing? Could it be delivering more? Explore why you may need the Information Center of Excellence.
» Read the article

The Challenges of Customer Data Integration (CDI). The requirement to integrate data is nothing new. The need to clean, manage, process, and maintain customer data in a sustained and deliberate way is emerging as more than a best practice, but a business imperative. CDI projects, while technically complex, should deliver meaningful customer data to the business at large. It could mean nothing less than competitive advantage.
» Read the article

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