Do you have a Data Jail in your Reference Data Management Infrastructure?
Cliff Cunningham, Director Product Marketing PolarLake
A Head of Enterprise Data Management at a large Financial Institution recently expressed frustration at their existing Reference Data infrastructure behaving like a Jail for their data. It was an intriguing analogy and an accurate description of the experience of a lot of Financial Services firms on how they interact with their data. In what other area of a Bank’s operation would a valuable, expensive commodity, useful to the business in all aspects of the operations be so difficult to consume? Can I easily interact, view, measure and monitor my Reference Data resources as I need to as a manufacturing outfit monitors its physical supply chain?
This caused us to try to formulate the characteristics of a Data Jail. A key complaint of firms who have the characteristics of a Data Jail in their Reference Data Management infrastructure is the nature of performance, both from an operational perspective and responsiveness to change. We came up with a short survey to help firms understand if they have a Data Jail in their organization:
- Are you in danger of missing your batch window loading bulk data during daily operations, with some reset batches even running over 24 hours?
- Is your budget being consumed by ever expanding new hardware, storage, power and data center costs?
- Are you missing key project delivery dates and blowing development budgets by spending your time tuning databases, networks and software to get tolerable performance?
- Is query time for data painfully slow according to your downstream consumers?
- Do performance problems cause consumers to go or want to go directly to the data vendor?
- Is the time taken to on-board a new data feeds measured in months not days?
- Is it difficult and unintuitive to query and extract data from any vendor across any asset class through your service in a format of your choice?
- Does it feel impossible to plan around escalating data volumes and business demands for more and more feeds?
- Is it painfully hard to provide that single extra field to the Equities Group who need that data element yesterday but must go into the development queue?
If you answer yes to three or more above you may very well have a Data Jail in your organization.
Often the industry’s lack of innovation in addressing the problems of performance, flexibility and ease of use is often blamed on how clients organize themselves (always the refuge of the end of life product, blame the client!). A theme at a lot of Enterprise Data Management conferences is that Data Management is not a technology problem, but a governance one. The implication of this is that we have innovated all we are ever likely to do in Data Management with all associated technologies. This always reminds me of the quote attributed to Thomas J Watson of IBM: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”.
We think this view is particularly defeatist and the traditional view of Reference Data Management being simply a data modelling exercise shows a lack of imagination and a disregard for true innovation. There are so many new and innovative ways to get at the Reference Data Management problem we are not at the end of technology innovation when it comes to Reference Data Management, it’s just the beginning!
To learn more about the next generation of innovation in Enterprise Data Management we’d love to talk to you and share our views.
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