What often makes EDM so challenging is that technology is evolving at a rapid pace. Advancements seem to appear daily. Some of the newer technologies that companies are incorporating into their EDM programs are unstructured content management and analysis, electronic data sharing (such as e-record sharing between health care providers, and product information between vendors and customers).
There have also been rapid advances in linking physical and digital data (such as radio frequency ID technologies) that help companies gather more information about customer behavior. The desire to implement these new technologies, along with the other challenges that we discussed last month, can make developing an effective EDM program an especially complex and problematic endeavor. Further, it is often difficult to pinpoint what an effective program really looks like.
In the interest of fostering a better understanding of effective EDM, I have developed my own list of the elements, or components, of an effective EDM program. These components will also involve just about every facet of a company's effort to better understand and manage its business. Fundamentally, I believe there are six components of an effective EDM program:
- Enterprise information management
- Business intelligence and data warehousing
- Enterprise portals
- Master data management
- Business performance management
- Data quality management
Figure 1: Enterprise Data Management
These six components encompass the breadth of information use across most typical companies. The quality and effectiveness of the design and implementation of these will almost certainly be a major factor in the results of the EDM program.
Let's begin with enterprise information management (EIM). I think there is a real distinction between EDM and EIM. EDM is the all-encompassing concept that includes every facet of data and information management, from data governance to information architecture design and deployment to data quality management. On the other hand, as I see it, EIM is a sub-function of the overall EDM process. Its main focus should be strategy and governance.
The EIM component of an EDM program is where the company's overall corporate information strategy - along with tactical execution plans - should be defined. It is also where the data governance standards, policies and procedures should be drawn up. The EIM component is also where enterprise information maturity models should be developed and refined, based on progress made in executing the strategy and governance policies and procedures.
The second component of an effective EDM program is business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW). There is a cornucopia of BI/DW products on the market. They all have their pros and cons, and certainly some are more effective than others (or at least more time-tested). However, which products a company chooses will not be as important in the long run as how they are used. First, an effective EDM program should have a comprehensive BI/DW strategy that takes into account how information is collected and used enterprise-wide - and how these activities might change over time. To effectively execute the strategy requires a detailed tactical plan, complete with goals, metrics, and milestones to help measure progress.
In addition to the BI/DW strategy and tactical plan, an effective EDM program should use leading data mining and analytics technologies to help better understand business activities and trends, such as transaction patterns, churn rates, customer contacts, etc. Finally, to truly have an effective EDM program, BI/DW efforts should be implemented with scalability and organizational growth in mind. The EDM program should be able to grow and change as the company - and its data needs - changes.
The third component of an effective EDM program is an investment in enterprise portals. Portals - also very effectively named - increase the likelihood that people who need information are able to get it when they need it. As with the BI/DW component of the EDM program, a comprehensive enterprise portal strategy is a must-have. The portal strategy should focus on two key areas:
- Providing user-centric, secure access to information facilitating sophisticated self-service capabilities so that, as much as practicably possible, portal users can interact with the portals (and, thus, the information infrastructure) when and how they need to.
- Creating a proactive, alert-based portal environment that helps users to be proactive in performing their jobs. A primary example of this is an executive dashboard that is alert-driven and gives C-level users (and whoever else might need it) the information they need, at their fingertips, to monitor key financial and/or business performance metrics and trends to identify potential problems and address them early on.
The fourth component of an effective EDM program is master data management (MDM). MDM is the process of helping a company to standardize the definition and attributes of all of its critical data elements (customer, vendor, product, etc.) to create a common point of reference enterprise wide. MDM can facilitate the sharing of data among all a company's disparate business functions, departments and even divisions - not to mention across all information systems, platforms and applications.
Of course, the MDM component of any EDM program should be founded on an effective enterprise-wide MDM strategy and tactical implementation plan. The strategy and plan should contain governance standards, a roadmap for implementation, a technology blueprint and MDM maturity models that depict the state of the MDM initiative at given points during implementation.
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