3 Top areas IT Leaders needs to focus on "Uncertain Times to bring back Company to a Growth Phase "

There can be many areas both at macro and micro level Industry Leaders need to focus to bring back the Top-line and Bottom-line and bring the Organization back to Stability.

The 3 Top areas are...

1) Reduce Costs to Improve Margins in changing the Business models

2) Focus on the Areas, Verticals and Technology helping in Winning Large Deals

3) Identify Extraordinary Performers across Consulting, Sales, Delivery and Incentivise

Would like to hear from other Thought Leaders on their perspective to figure out other areas of focus on a larger note.

DATA GOVERNANCE - A need and necessity for all Organizations to get the best out of Analytics

Fragmented inconsistent Customer data hides revenue recognition, introduces risk, creates sales inefficiencies, and results in misguided marketing campaigns and lost customer loyalty. According to Forrester, 92% of companies believe having an integrated view of customer data is either “critical” or “very important.” Only 2% have actually achieved that goal. 

Why have only 2% of companies achieved a 360 Degree Customer view?
Because customer data integration (CDI) isn’t just about customer relationship management (CRM). Customer data is often created and maintained in non-CRM. Moreover   data warehouse is an analytical solution, not an operational, transactional solution.
And building your own customer master application is too risky–and expensive. Building instead of buying will keep you mired in data model design for years.
MDM (Master Data Management)  is the technical foundation of data management while Data Governance is its facilitating and supporting framework. More precisely, DG is a convergence of people, technology and processes that helps a business to manage the availability, utilization and security of their data assets.

SUMMARY
MDM is the technical foundation of data management while data governance is the overall business management framework that facilitates and supports technology implementations and ensures alignment with corporate strategy. 
Governance has its own set of program components. In this context, a technology namely (Data Governance Manager) DGM is designed to facilitate data quality and data stewardship processes for the data steward. It provides an intuitive graphical user interface that acts as the single management destination and reference for data stewards and business users to manage customer data throughout various stages of the lifecycle. 
Most companies do not combine data governance and MDM when getting started, so they fall short in addressing the people and process issues that cause data quality issue in the first place. Oracle’s Data Governance Manager simplifies and streamlines data stewardship 
tasks and is a core tool for improving data quality –which is a key to MDM success.

DATA GOVERNANCE 
Data governance is a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.

A sound data governance strategy not only aligns business and IT to address data issues; but also, defines data ownership and policies, data quality processes, decision rights and escalation procedures.

Business Challenges on CLOUD and does DATA Management has a Role ?

An IDC survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues identified a number of issues:

• Security - 74% identified security as an issue involving data privacy and resource access control. 

• Integration - 61% found that it is hard to integrate Cloud Apps with in-house applications. 

• Operational Costs - 50% are worried that On Demand will actually cost more given the impact of poor data quality on the rest of the enterprise. 

• Compliance - 49% felt that compliance with required regulatory, legal and general industry requirements (such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a major issue. When control is lost, the ability of a provider to directly manage how and where data is deployed, used and destroyed is negatively impacted. 

Obviously there are many more but have mentioned the Top 4 Issues because of their “Affiliation with Data Management”. Once Data Management is strongly integrated into a Cloud Computing infrastructure, can significantly revolutionize all of these problems. Data Management is the ideal Cloud companion. At a Strategic note, Data Management can immensely increase the chances for successful Cloud initiatives.”

Data Management provides a complete solution to each of the above concern areas:

• Security – Data Management provides functionality for Privacy Management for all Party Entities (Individual, or Organization). Also Data Management provides placeholders for stronger and effective Resource Access Control based on roles and responsibilities

• Integration – Data Management provides the platform for pre-integration of Cloud Applications with each other and with On Premise applications at the Data level. 

• Operational Costs – Data Management significantly reduces operational costs by increasing data quality, thereby improving enterprise business processes efficiency. 

• Compliance – Data Management  along with strong inbuilt Data Governance functional capabilities, insures that the data is governed, managed and maintained according to organizational frameworks, guidelines and standards. It provides the platform for speedy and truthful reporting for compliance resulting in increase credibility and avoiding cost penalties.

Weekend Thought continues.....

The little Highlighted side of Big Data & Data Management

Big Data is a dual combination of Big Data Storage and Big Data Analytics. The first part can be handled by Virtualization and Infrastructure while the second part is more inclined towards Data Management which is a mixture of ECM + MDM + BI + SOA

The largest basis of perplexity starts from the words like Big Data storage and Big Data analytics and their line of intersection and disconnection. The idiom “Big Data” derived from within the open source community world.  There is an attempt to put Analytics on the top of the Big Data to get clear insights of business processes, business models both at the department wise and enterprise wise. It would result in faster and more scalable technology enabled model than traditional data warehousing. The bottom-line was to extract value from the enormous amounts of unstructured data produced daily by web users. At a very basic level, Big Data storage is just storage device that handles plethora of data for applications that create and produce huge volumes and dimensions of unstructured data fueling data growth at the enterprise level and sometimes at the division or department levels.

One of the biggest producer and consumer of Data today are the large Enterprise Applications like; CRM, customer relationship management; ERP, enterprise resource planning;  or SCM, supply chain management and companies keep of spending millions of dollar from investment to development and finally to maintenance and support. The Data stored in the these applications not to bring down the Operational Efficiencies or increase IT Agility but also to gain Business Intelligence from the insights and information of the quality of Data for which now MDM, Master Data Management is becoming quintessential to ensure the Golden view of Records. Further to that, you can learn about the preferences of an individual customer and personalize your offerings for that particular customer.

Industry Leaders should set up a framework by which the Data – which is stored in all applications, are very fine grained and are looked at Enterprise level, so that all CXO & decision makers would be able to take advantage and draw inflection and coherence of making different business and customer proposition to increase the Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty

Future of CRM -> "One-CEM" Strategy

Customer Experience Management named as CEM is the new buzzword for Companies who are focused on End-to-End Customer Life-cycle Management.

with all new tools in the market from Oracle and Salesforce side of the likes of Fusion CRM and Salesforce CRM, we need to device a Strategy which needs to be Product Agnostic.

There comes "One-CEM Strategy". The Differentiator of this Strategic move would be
1) One-CEM Framework
2) One-CEM Methodology
3) One-CEM Architecture
4) One-CEM Value-props
5) One-CEM Differentiators
6) One-CEM Thought Leadership

Would like to hear from Thought Leaders on the successful Execution of this Strategy

IT Transformation - Moving from 'Traditional RFP' to 'Innovative RFS' in getting New Deals

As the weekend closes by a Thought Ideation...

Are Company ready to move from the Traditional 'RFP - Request for Proposal' Bid Management and move towards New model called as "RFS - Request for Solution" ?

How and where will you can utilize the information/answer you seek:  Bringing a Change in the Business Model for Bidding for both existing and new Customers.

Would like to hear your thoughts on this across Industries/Domains or Products or Technology

Thought Leadership in Initiating the "Agile BU/Practice/CoE Model"

Agile is a term associated more at the Project level. Now as a step forward, can we move this Agile methodology at Practice level or Business Unit level or at a Delivery Unit level ? 

This will bring Innovation at Practice level in terms of Capacity Management. Secondly during the Customer Pricing, it can be dynamic based on the Agility of the Practice/CoE. Thirdly this model with give direction to Employees in terms of being part of Thought Leadership - Strategic Initiatives 

Would request all the IT Leaders to pour in their Thoughts....

TOP 5 Activities for Establishment of Center of Excellence (CoE)

1) Setting up the DATA LABs and Learning & Development

•  Platform and Product oriented websites for PoC, Training and Developments

2) Processes & GTM - Collaterals from Consulting to Implementation

•  Presales  & Consulting – moving from plain RFP to RFS solution approach

3) Thought Leadership - Differentiators – USP for Deal wins

•  It can be in IPs/Frameworks/Accelerators and commoditization of Whitepapers

4) Strategic Partnership & Alliance

•  Solution Labs, Specializations, Co-development Partner, GTM Strategy

5) Capability & Competency Building & Future Investments

•  Agile Practice Model and Future New Investments

5 Top Themes on DATA Management space

1)Customer Experience Management ( CRM + MDM + SOA + BI/EDW)

üEnable Customer Experience by Creating a 360 Degree  Single View of the Customer

üEnable Great Cross-Channel Buying Experiences

üEnable Cross-Channel Service Experiences

2)Information Management – MDM on Cloud

üData Management for CRM on Cloud

üImproved Decisioning through Social Data

3)Introduction of New System & Consolidation

üSystem Consolidation

üERP or CRM Upgrade or Migration

üSingle View of Customer

4)Compliance & Analytics

üEnable Compliance and Security

üEnhance IT Agility

üProvide BI Foundation

5)Big Data & EIM

üSingle view of Information Management  in both structured and unstructured data

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Blueprint Starter Guide in Business & Roadmap Consulting

This Blog brings on to light the step by step Blueprint guide procedure and guidelines during the Business Consulting and Road-mapping Consulting assignment. This is followed by the Templatized steps of this blueprint guide activity list in details with the process flow and templates of the Business Consulting document. Mentioned below is the starter guide how to go about doing the Business Consulting assignment

a)      Introduction to Consulting Projects

To kick start the Consulting project there should be clear understanding of the business goals and intentions of the consulting assignment. Underline the Strategic pain points of the Customer. Emphasize with agreement with Customer between what can be delivered and what cannot part of the Consulting assignment

                           i.            Introduction & Purpose

                         ii.            Problem Context and Objectives

                       iii.            In- Scope  and Out of Scope

b)      Framework- IT Strategic Initiatives: Consulting Methodology

Have laid down a four steps guideline framework which can be used across domains, products and technologies for any consulting assignment. This can vary based on customer’s requirements on case to case basis.

                           i.            Assessment Phase

                         ii.            Investigation Phase

                       iii.            Modeling Phase

                       iv.            Roadmap Phase

c)      Due Diligence - Input to Output Workflow steps

Due- Diligence is a must in consulting assignment with all major tasks listed for each section of the framework. This is followed by a Workflow model with Input and Output Parameter based on Tools and Methodologies for each model of the Framework. Immediately followed are some of the templates in capturing requirements from the customer.

                           i.            Assessment needs

                         ii.            Investigation needs

                       iii.            Process Modeling needs

                       iv.            Roadmap & next steps ahead

d)      Final Service Provider Consulting Framework

This is one pager pictorial view of different stages of the Consulting Framework. This slide will be very useful part of Thought Leadership Initiatives to showcase the Differentiators in Consulting space to win large Transformational deals.

e)      Summary – Tasks and Deliverables

Finally this section highlights on list of tasks and deliverables on each stages of the Consulting framework. This section also brings to notice the month of delivery of each task based framework to complete the final Consulting engagement.

Catalyst towards BIG DATA - Need for “Single View of Customer” -SVOC

“Organizations typically have customer data spread across many systems. It is fragmented and often inconsistent. This makes it difficult for organizations to understand the true value of customers, their likely behavior, their needs, and also the risks associated with them. Without a single view of those customers, organizations are in the dark and cannot effectively retain customers, cross-sell to them, deliver the right customer experience to them, or manage the risk associated with them. Some form of single customer view is, therefore, fundamental to managing customer relationships.”—Gartner, “Creating the Single Customer View with Customer Data Integration,” by John Radcliffe

Enterprises today are looking for ways to better recognize their customers to enhance the business share with target marketing and solution offerings that would enable to retain them from competition. Organizations are persistent in introducing more personalized and ever delightful experience to customers and offering products which are value differentiators to augment revenues. 

But, this entire endeavor is in vain when you don’t know the real who (customer)? Because when multiple profiles of the same customer exists non-standardized, un-cleansed and incomplete across multiple channels it complicates the situation. In the age of multiple functional applications, state of the art and legacy platforms, heterogeneous environments and most of all slack integration and governance regimes; the chances of customer information being inconsistent across channels and business units is prevalent. 

Hence enterprises need to understand the root causes of these problems and look for enterprise wide solution which first addresses the consolidation of this information to create Single View of Customer [SVOC]

The market dynamics which drive Single view of Customer Master Data are identified and defined below; these are classified as primary driving forces. We believe that there are certain auxiliary forces as well which are situation and business dependent and are not detailed here:

1. Regulatory Compliance is a key driver and the most forceful need for SVOC, as every industry is driven by some watch dog directive that is a do-or-pay situation
2. Then we have mature and more advanced competition as enterprises act more globally and go transnational in defining customer handling strategy and approach in every domain of business. Mergers & Acquisitions defines gargantuan data challenges and organizations starve to resolve them as the problem ranges across information ownership, process and people
3. Subsequently, we have Consumer behavior, as the culture of conducting business is changing at amazing pace in last four decades the consumer’s interest and service expectations from the organizations have also changed in big leaps going from store based systems to near real-time online needs.

A successful SVOC implementation not only helps to retain profitable customers but also addresses challenges of any enterprise to grow its customer base. The customer base growth opportunity comes from multiple avenues as follows:

• Accurate and complete customer data let the enterprise to leverage various cross sell and up sell opportunities.
• SVOC solution that contains information about prospects allows enterprises to increase their prospect-to-customer conversion proportion, thus increasing the customer base.
• MDM’s ability to discover and understand the complete picture of current and complete relationships allow an enterprise to create a targeted set of marketing campaigns and products and services offers that may prove to be more cost effective and demonstrate higher lift than traditional mass marketing

In short SVOC has lead to a transformation of moving enterprises to customer centric business models and is truly revolutionary albeit “common sense” based approach to drastically improve the enterprise business landscape

DATA and Cloud - Relationship as one Unit

As the world moves post recession in an uncertain recovery fashion, two things have become critical and imperative for all CXOs in the Organization as far as IT driving the Top-line and Bottom-line

a. How to bring down the Total cost of Ownership ( from Hardware, Software, Licenses, Resources)
b. How to maximize the ROI (Return on Investment) and RoE ( Return on Expenses)

Before starting off, we all should know the nuances and uniqueness of Cloud Computing: Any applications delivered over Internet are called as Cloud Computing. The applications are hosted in a single or multiple data-centers (DC).From an accessibility perspective it can be used around the globe. The cost model is based on your monthly usability per subscription. 

From the business benefits angles, the applications can be personalized and scale up or scale down based on customer requirements. Organizations no need to have their proprietary hardware or licenses or no need of spending additional expenses on maintenance. Also the nightmare of upgrades or patch of enterprises applications completely dries out.

Master Data Management (MDM) is the framework of processes and technologies aimed at creating and maintaining an authoritative, reliable, sustainable, accurate and secure data environments that represents a “Single version of Truth or Golden Record” an accepted system of record used both intra and inter-enterprise across a diverse set of application systems, lines of business, and user communities. 

From the business benefits angles, with MDM on place, it helps in generating the Golden records with Hierarchical and cross-domain relationships for all Party entities (ex-Individuals, Organization, Households) resulting in Cross-sell and Up-sell resulting in increasing the “share of wallet” and Improvising “Just in Time” customer service resulting in “Customer Loyalty”. MDM brings down the Operational and Integration cost factors and increases IT agility and with MDM enabler to “Right set of Analytical Data” helps in Compliances, Risk profiling and decision making process.

WHY “CLOUD” AND “MDM ON CLOUD” IS SO HYPED?

Based on an IDC survey, these proactive leaders are experiencing significant benefits from the use of public cloud services.  Specifically, among the 616 organizations in the survey that are using public cloud services:

• 45% of leaders are reporting they are able to reduce IT staff, FTEs and/or training expenses using 
public cloud services, versus 35% of mainstream organizations.
• 36% of leaders are seeing improved competitive positioning from their use of public cloud services, compared to 28% of the mainstream sample.
• 36% of leaders see an improved ability to deal with spikes in demand using public cloud services, compared to 26% of mainstream organizations,
• 33% of leaders experience better end-to-end application performance from using public cloud services, compared to 24% of mainstream organizations.
While these trends were consistent around the world, the survey did show some international variability.  
For example: Among U.S. based IT decision makers currently using public cloud services, 42% said they were seeing reductions in IT staff expenses, FTEs, and/or training costs, compared to 37% of the total sample (including the U.S. respondents).

By 2015, 10 percent of packaged MDM implementations will be delivered as SaaS in the public cloud. Currently, MDM is typically implemented in on-premises solutions.  – “according to Gartner”

"On the supply side, very few MDM technology and service providers have, so far, developed specific MDM SaaS or PaaS products that are scalable, elastic and multitenant," said Radcliffe". 

Weekend Thought continues.....

Data as a Strategic Asset and Big Data

According to Industry experts, only close to 0-10% of Information created is structured and remaining 0-90% is multi data sets which are both structured and un-structured in nature and growing at an exponential pace that will surpass the growth of only transactional data. One of the classical example is the location detail in mobiles gets more quickly updated than the number of times one goes to bank ATM and do a withdrawal from the bank.

Around 19th century, thinking of 1 Exabyte or Petabyte of data storage or intelligence data analysis was an imagination people would not have acknowledged. 10 years post to that industries recognized the need for the analysis of Gigabyte and slowly move towards Terabyte and today in 21st century we are all talking how we could handle, store, search, organize, archive, de-duplicate and do intelligence analysis of Petabyte of data – to increase the top line and bottom-line of the organization.

Suddenly with the exponential “Data Explosion” across Applications landscape, companies are doing a due-diligence how to use the “Data Deluge” to drive the profitability and revenue growth. As we move ahead towards 2020, Organization needs to shift their gears from SAAS- software as a service, PAAS – process as a service, and IAAS – infrastructure as a service to “DAAS – Data as a Service”. The growing volume of Data inform of “Structured Data – Transactional and Master data”, “Unstructured Data – in form of files, letter, videos, images etc etc..” and Social Media Data – in form of public websites, corporate social websites, multichannel ” has resulted in coining a term called as “Big Data”

Big Data as the name suggests is an amalgamation of large, complex, dynamic data sets which in un-manageable under the existing or current technological landscape both from storage and intelligence insights overview. According to Gartner, many IT leaders are attempting to manage "big data" challenges by focusing on the high volumes of information to the exclusion of the many other dimensions of information management, leaving massive challenges to be addressed later, Big data is a popular term used to acknowledge the exponential growth, availability and use of information in the data-rich landscape of tomorrow.

“Big Data” is not one more mechanism with Data-warehousing capabilities which stores neither large volume of data or data types nor one ERP package. Its objective is towards realizing the Business outcomes by tapping all then Enterprise data assets and discovering unknown relationships between customers, products, locations or suppliers. To get the best out of the “Big Data” Organizations needs to build the physical infrastructure to capture and handle the extreme volumes of data with respective data types. It can then be consolidated and integrated with proper Data Governance to get the “Single source of Truth” – which can be feed for Data mining and Analytics and result in more Acquisitions, Analysis and be an enabler for increasing the top line and bottom-line of the organization. 

Today as the world going through lot of uncertainty and crisis situations, organization look forward to implement “Data as a Strategic Asset”. Data Harnessing and Enrichment is like Renewable energy. Like organizations harness raw energy to be converted into usable energy, today companies feel the raw data to be converted into usable data and then enrich the same to get the maximum benefits from the insights of Data. Companies are looking for re-engineering the “Big Data” as a Strategic Initiative and using technology to implement the same and monetize it.

MDM AND CLOUD – Relationship as one Single unit

As the world moves post recession in an uncertain recovery fashion, two things have become critical and imperative for all CXOs in the Organization as far as IT driving the Top-line and Bottom-line

1. How to bring down the Total cost of Ownership ( from Hardware, Software, Licenses, Resources)
2. How to maximize the ROI (Return on Investment) and RoE ( Return on Expenses)

Before starting off, we all should know the nuances and uniqueness of Cloud Computing: Any applications delivered over Internet are called as Cloud Computing. The applications are hosted in a single or multiple data-centers (DC).From an accessibility perspective it can be used around the globe. The cost model is based on your monthly usability per subscription.

From the business benefits angles, the applications can be personalized and scale up or scale down based on customer requirements. Organizations no need to have their proprietary hardware or licenses or no need of spending additional expenses on maintenance. Also the nightmare of upgrades or patch of enterprises applications completely dries out.

Master Data Management (MDM) is the framework of processes and technologies aimed at creating and maintaining an authoritative, reliable, sustainable, accurate and secure data environments that represents a “Single version of Truth or Golden Record” an accepted system of record used both intra and inter-enterprise across a diverse set of application systems, lines of business, and user communities.

From the business benefits angles, with MDM on place, it helps in generating the Golden records with Hierarchical and cross-domain relationships for all Party entities (ex-Individuals, Organization, Households) resulting in Cross-sell and Up-sell resulting in increasing the “share of wallet” and Improvising “Just in Time” customer service resulting in “Customer Loyalty”. MDM brings down the Operational and Integration cost factors and increases IT agility and with MDM enabler to “Right set of Analytical Data” helps in Compliances, Risk profiling and decision making process.

Strategic business context behind “Data migration initiative”

Data has become one of the Strategic Asset for all Organizations in Decision making process having a direct impact on the top line and bottom line of any organization. The challenges have become manifold with the innovation and arrival of social data, Big Data and data on the cloud among few and many more are on the process of evolution. The increased demand of “Data as an Asset” for effective Decision making with focus of maintaining accuracy and consistency of improved business decisions without proper IT infrastructure and systems is hitting company’s profitability and revenue.

Read more in the Page - Data Management - Next Big Revolution

Why CRM is not a platform to Master your Data?

Some people might be squabbling for CRM over MDM. This is not completely wrong, if all the data is centralized and modeled, managed by single instance of CRM then that organization might not need a separate MDM and governance initiative but Data enrichment still becomes mandatory for greater business process efficiencies. However, it rarely happens that a large or even a mid size company runs most of its transactions in one instance of CRM. Cross referencing is also a huge challenge which would be helpful in discovering relationships and hierarchies. (More pointers on the same are highlighted in figure1-solution connections and figure 2 – functional business connections of CRM and MDM existing together)

 CRM was meant to give a single view of transactional data and not a single view of business master data. An effective and efficient MDM implementation is one of the few IT strategic program companies can pursue to realize near-immediate business process improvements across many different areas within the enterprise. Numerous organizations with extensive CRM implementations strive to make their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application suite the focus and the basis of their MDM initiatives by customizing the business and data model. It seems like an appealing proposition, given the possibility of reusability on existing IT infrastructure, investment, technical and expert knowledge and so forth. However CRM systems are not designed to support master data management, data governance of whole lifecycle of record, generation of golden record across the whole enterprise and are simply not the right place to master your data.

CRM was meant to give a Single view of Transactional data and not a Single view of Business Master Data

More you can read in CRM Page....