Getting to grips with your data

Today, to avoid falling foul of the regulators, being able to manage accurate and clean data is the name of the game, says Colin Rickard from DataFlux.

CXO. What are the main challenges that companies face when managing vast swathes of data, especially across different regions and cultures?

CR. Since systems began to proliferate to meet different business needs, you have had the problem of lots of different silos of information. For example, if you have a pharmaceutical manufacturing site, then you will have a product lifecycle that will go from research through to production and testing, and on to distribution. You will also have different systems at each point within that lifecycle maintaining data about your product. Unfortunately, key pieces of the master data then get spread across these systems, so you never have a single view of your data, and without this view organisations find it very difficult to get answers to questions about their business. This is something that companies have been wrestling with for a long time.

CXO. What are the downsides or penalties for organisations that fail to comply with the raft of data regulations out there?  

CR. There are a lot of them, and they can be severe. We have definitely seen a number of organisations turn to us this year because compliance and regulatory drivers are forcing organisations to say, ‘It’s about time I really took a look at my data and understand it because I don’t want to be caught out by problems with it’. That's why the term ‘data governance’ is being heard more and more, and companies are focusing on ensuring that data across the enterprise is correct. It's an area that we do a lot of work in. Today, organisations need to monitor standards and be proactive about data quality. This is completely different than it was five years ago, when it was a very reactive situation. It was very much a batch thing that you did offline. These days, most of my conversations are around proactively ensuring that data is correct and wanting to know that it is correct before the regulator asks about it.

CXO. How important is it to have data governance and data integration in place?

CR. The days of it being optional are gone. Data is an asset and one of the things that you do with an asset is put money and people into it to ensure that it adds value to your business. You invest in and maintain your asset. For instance, you wouldn’t dream of not having your fleet of trucks serviced regularly, yet data is allowed to degrade instead of being maintained. Companies spend a lot of money on acquiring data but very little on maintaining it. It’s an area of the business that used to fall on deaf ears but executives are beginning to understand that investing in data is extremely important.

CXO. What prompted the change in thinking?

CR. A lot of it has to do with regulation. It’s about executives wanting an insurance policy around data, while stories in the media about data issues have helped bring it to the board level. Most system owners now want to put data quality firewalls around their systems to ensure that the data they consume is clean, consistent and accurate. After all, why wouldn’t you want to put a data policeman or data quality firewall in place?

CXO. How is DataFlux helping organisations to better manage their data?  

CR. You need an environment where you can store business rules about pieces of data and where those rules can effectively monitor what is going on in your enterprise. It needs to be able to flag when things go wrong so you can fix them before they become an issue. In order to do that, you need a server that you can effectively police in real-time. This was difficult five or six years ago but these days we use web services and service-orientated architecture (SOA) to enable us to link lots of different systems. So this, in turn, has enabled organisations to enforce business rules in real-time across the enterprise, ensuring the accuracy of information and helping them build a more dynamic way to understand the impact of bad data on their organisation.

Colin Rickard is Managing Director for DataFlux West and North Europe.

He joined DataFlux UK Ltd as Managing Director in 2006, bringing over 15 years of experience in the construction and implementation of customer systems in both the UK and US markets. Rickard’s responsibilities at DataFlux include developing DataFlux’s commercial prospects in both the UK and European markets and overseeing the sales and technical teams. Prior to this role Rickard held the position of Head of Managed Services at Detica, a specialist IT consultancy.