The Information Management post Why Business Executives Should Care about a High-Level Data Model provides a good reminder why business stakeholder involvement is critical to an information strategy. Strong business engagement from the executive level and down is required to ensure the data represents the business and this shared representation is consistent across the organization. Data models are clearly the foundational prerequisite to transforming towards an analytical culture. A key point from an execution view is the trap that companies fall into by taking a "project" or "line of business" approach to their information strategy and data modeling. The result is siloed solutions that do not enable powerful analytics across the entire organization.
At Microsoft we have begun a multi-year journey to holistically model data that enables key decision-making processes across the sales and marketing organization. Our approach to the data modeling process is collaborative including key members from the business, business architects, information architects, solution managers and program managers. Although a "project" may be driving the data model for specific subject areas, these projects are steps in the roadmap to building out our Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Microsoft's EDW standardizes and integrates data to eliminate legacy siloed solutions managed by both IT and the business. The business outcomes include reduced costs, sales and marketing productivity, and improvements in customer and partner satisfaction.
Our progress over the last few months has reinforced how powerful business engagement is to standardizing data model definitions across multiple sales and marketing operating models that in the past have operated independently. Strong business and IT leadership is a catalyst for this collaborative approach to our data modeling process and the journey to integrating the organization silos that exist today.
Recent Comments