Who Let that Elephant into the Room?
What drives data innovation within the commercial and not-for-profit sectors? The servicing of their end users, be they internal decision makers or customers. To do so accurately and competitively, you need to maintain and manage all associated data. From the advent of databases to verticalized data marts, a recurring problem has been seen, but largely ignored – how do you get a sales mart to speak with a finance mart that needs to speak with a best-of-breed HR database? Getting them to physically speak (on the networking side) hasn’t been the overriding issue – it’s how to ensure the data in these separate data silos isn’t being replicated (or isn’t replicated because of misspelling) and enforcing the need for data fields to share a common meaning. In other words, does a dollar = a dollar throughout the enterprise? For example, the finance mart may use the term Customer – this may mean only external sales customers to the finance department. But the sales department may list in their
