At Informatica World 2021, our CEO Amit Walia announced the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud, and Chief Product Officer Jitesh Ghai discussed the key attributes and services provided. (Watch the video from the keynote announcement.)
In this blog post, I’m going one layer deeper to show how the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud improves simplicity, productivity and scale of master data management (MDM). Let’s look closer at the three ways the Intelligent Data Management Cloud improves master data management.
The practice of master data management requires a core set of data management capabilities. Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud simplifies the technical architecture for master data management by integrating comprehensive data management capabilities into a microservices-based, API-driven architecture. When you license master data management and 360 solutions, you get core services required for master data management like data integration, data quality, master data consolidation, and application integration in an all-in-one, usage-based offering.
This graphic shows the comprehensive services and capabilities provided by the Intelligent Data Management Cloud.
From a master data management and 360-degree view perspective we seamlessly integrate Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud services into an All-in-One solution. Let’s quickly walk through how the services are used to deliver a single source of truth, and 360 views and insights:
One of the challenges with most master data management offerings is limited capabilities – both in terms of breadth and depth of functionality provided. That means you must settle for suboptimal functionality or try to integrate third-party solutions. Our all-in-one approach gives you the simplicity and speed of a business 360 application with the power and flexibility of the Intelligent Data Management Cloud.
A point-product approach is problematic: Connecting and updating these point solutions over time creates a technical debt that reduces an organization’s ability to quickly respond to changing market conditions. It’s a big risk for the business. In fact, according to MIT Sloan Management Review, 70% of IT and business leaders say technical debt severely limits their ability to innovate.
The shared services provided by the Intelligent Data Management Cloud also simplifies the system development lifecycle. For example, automating the tracking of project dependencies between governance policies, quality rules and master data management models, as well as the promotion of all the required components from development to quality assurance to production as part of the system development lifecycle. And, development teams can update microservices-based capabilities independently and put them into production, simplifying and accelerating upgrades.
Simplicity is also delivered in the context of data access and consumption. The combined capabilities within Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud enables greater understanding and insight using a master data knowledge graph to visualize relationships between master data domains (e.g., customers, products and locations) as well as unstructured data and content (e.g., web chat logs, service contract PDFs or product maintenance manuals). And, data marketplace capabilities simplify finding and compliantly accessing master data for use in analytics, marketing campaigns and other activities.
The simplified technical architecture described above, as well as prebuilt functionality like data models, rules, workflow, user interfaces and the 150+ out-of-the-box data connectors, accelerates deployment of master data management and increases administrative productivity. The Intelligent Data Management Cloud also provides role- and exception-based task management, allowing diverse groups of people with varying technical skills to work on master data activities in parallel. Orchestration of workflow includes push notifications to responsible parties and automatically assigning new owners or rerouting tasks based on different conditions.
A multinational consumer packaged goods company significantly increased productivity through simplified workflow and self-service capabilities. Here are a few examples:
Additionally, supplier self-service and automated data quality and verification checks helped increase compliance with numerous local regulations. They also automated publication of supplier master data to applications such as inventory management, purchasing, financial and marketing systems, which drove further productivity improvements in activities like demand forecasting, production planning and financial reporting and analysis.
The Intelligent Data Management Cloud also drives productivity gains through artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation. Using the CLAIRE AI engine, you can automate master data discovery and domain identification. Or automate the mapping between source and target schemas when importing new master data records.
The following graphic shows some examples of how AI-powered automation can increase productivity of data management activities associated with master data management.
In terms of boosting productivity, here are a few more AI-driven data management use cases to consider:
As the sources, volume, use cases and users of data continue to grow, scalability is critical to the practice of master data management. With the Intelligent Data Management Cloud, you can automatically increase or decrease infrastructure resources as needed to adapt to variable workloads.
As requests for services increase, new instances of the service can be launched – and when requests decline, service instances can be shut down. This elastic scalability is enabled using:
Ingestion of new master data records, and match, merge and deduplication are some examples of master data processes that require elastic scalability.
The Intelligent Data Management Cloud increases scalability of master data discovery and domain identification. The broad array of prebuilt connectors and use of AI techniques like clustering, data similarity and semantic tagging help automate inspecting tens or hundreds of millions of columns across thousands of sources to find master data. With organizations using 100 applications on average [1] , data volumes forecasted to grow at 20% or more a year, and data lakes growing at 30%, scaling master data discovery and domain identification requires intelligent automation.
With the Intelligent Data Management Cloud, you can increase the scalability of master data use cases. For example, customer experience requires the ability to orchestrate the flow of data across processes and applications spanning multiple areas of the business. Our capabilities support multiple architectural patterns including messaging, API calls and event-based data flow, which helps you scale your customer experience efforts across every business function, channel and interaction touchpoint of the customer journey.
In this video, see how the Intelligent Data Management Cloud orchestrates master data flow in an order management process.
The Intelligent Data Management Cloud increases scalability of master data users. Search capabilities across structured and unstructured data and graph-based network navigation makes master data access and use easier for people with a wide range of technical skills. Scaling broad and consistent use of data at all levels of the organization helps improve business outcomes.
In this video, Jenn Yim, Data Supply Chain & AI Program Manager at TELUS, a leading communications and information technology company explains how they use Informatica to scale master data use across marketing, billing, call center and other functions to provide a superior customer experience.
I’ve detailed how Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud improves simplicity, productivity, and scale of master data management. It’s important to remember these three benefits are interrelated and act as self-reinforcing feedback loops: Simplicity increases productivity, which, in turn, increases scale that can further increase simplicity.
Want to learn more? Join us at the MDM 360 + Data Governance Summit.
During the two-hour event, Gartner’s Malcolm T. Hawker will explain how to optimize master data management program value. And, Informatica product leaders will host two breakout sessions on Business 360 and Data Governance and Privacy, where you can hear from your peers and get guidance on data management challenges. Save your spot now – sign up using the links below:
