Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

Charm School: It’s Not Just for IT Anymore

In which Jill reminds the business that it’s their business, too.

In 2008 Business Week reported that Kimberly-Clark had run a charm school for its pared-down IT workforce. The consumer packaged goods giant had recently outsourced almost 80 percent of its technology staff, and there were high expectations for the survivors. Improving communications with the business constituency was a priority. Hence the techie finishing school.

There’s a great Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert asks a user for his business requirements. The user suggest that instead Dilbert just build the system, “and then I’ll tell your boss that it doesn’t meet my needs.” Welcome to a new era of shared accountability where the business is—or at least, should be—as much on the hook for IT project success as IT is.

As we’ve formalized business requirements gathering processes and even adopted new tools to help us automate them, business users can no longer simply finger-wag at IT. They’ve got skin in the game, too. As much as they’d prefer to call someone to run some numbers, or rattle of a wish list in a status meeting, business stakeholders need formal rules of engagement just as much as their IT brethren. Likewise, IT managers can’t simply rely on the overblown promises of iterative prototyping to draw users in, or depend on their trusty enterprise app vendor to prescribe a solution in a vacuum. Mutual accountability is the new black.

The diagram below illustrates an example of a sustained hand-off cycle between IT and the business at one of our clients:

In essence, this was the unified gameplan that had been missing. In this new world, the business can’t enlist IT until they’ve done their own homework. This means thoroughly defining the initiative—here, ensuring that it’s aligned to strategy and a complete business case is developed—before engaging IT and entering the development pipeline. Note that each of the numbered steps represents its own process or set of processes. (IT people will enjoy the divine justice that there are more steps on the business side.)

Business stakeholders need to not only adopt their own processes for defining and justifying initiatives, but they have to articulate their expectations clearly and stay actively involved in delivery. The days of the IT-business mind-meld when technology staff relied on gut-feel, personal relationships, and so much storytelling to arrive at the right technology solution are over. So are the days of what blogger Xavier Noemann calls the “Kramden-esque hamana hamana” of user-speak. The fact is business users have to step up, articulate their desired outcomes, and work with IT. And maybe they can start being nicer to each other, charm school be damned!

photo by Bogdix via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

Ode to Initiate Systems

In which Jill pays homage to a class act.

The rumors of IBM’s acquisition of MDM vendor Initiate Systems were confirmed yesterday in an IBM press release.  Herewith, a brief homage.

A few years ago Initiate Chief Scientist Scott Schumacher dropped by our L.A. offices to introduce his fledgling company and to share some MDM successes. If you don’t know Scott, this is like saying that Robert Deniro showed up to block a couple scenes, or that Jimmy Page needed to borrow your guitar to try out a new riff. Needless to say, I took notes.

Upon learning of our forthcoming book on CDI, Initiate referred Evan and me to several of its customers. One was Marty Moseley, at the time Intuit’s Chief Architect. These were the days when people still couldn’t articulate the difference between an MDM hub and a data warehouse. I asked Marty how he made the internal pitch for MDM at Intuit, and his answer was refreshingly plainspoken: “We have SOA here at Intuit. It helps us make sure that our systems do what they’re good at. Why would I use my data warehouse to do MDM? That’s like saying SAP can do everything. We needed to operationally integrate our customer data. So we bought a hub.” Marty went on to become Initiate’s CTO and a good friend.

Where other vendors hoard contacts and micro-manage their messaging, Initiate made transparency part of its culture. When our book was published CEO Bill Conroy personally offered his support and that of his management staff, and would follow up with personal notes of congratulation and regular company updates. Bill knows how to build a good management team too, and Gina Sandon and her marketing team fell over backwards to provide me with industry research. Ian Stahl, Andrea Zivalich, Michelle Woolfolk, Rick Clements, Jim Cushman, Lorraine Fernandes, and Greg Shaw have all been similarly supportive and impressive.

In addition to being an acknowledged leader in healthcare (most notably, master patient index) and government (person-of-interest recognition), Initiate has blazed a trail across a range of industries, geographies, and value propositions. Its matching algorithm is arguably second-to-none, it led the way in defining the concept of exchanges, and its data governance and stewardship offerings were first out of the gate.

Initiate’s acquisition means that its new parent company can now make good on those Sunday-morning network commercials that flaunt its leadership in health care and information integration. I do predict that Initiate will be more difficult to absorb into IBM than its rival Siperian will with Informatica. I’ve spoken to two Initiate Customer Advisory Board gatherings and the consensus among heavy-hitter customers is that they invested in Initiate precisely because it wasn’t a one of the big enterprise app vendors.

In the dark of night most owners of MDM programs will admit that they ultimately chose their MDM solution because the vendor was already incumbent, or because the incumbent vendor was willing to provide a steep discount (read, free) in exchange for a reference. But Initiate customers tell a different story. “We bought Initiate because of [insert Initiate employee name here]. And because they weren’t [insert large vendor name here].”

Don’t eff it up, IBM.

The Good News about MDM Market Consolidation

In which Jill stays high on MDM.

I usually root for the little guy, so when I first heard the rumor that there were multiple bidders for Siperian, I figured that SAP would take it home and that it really was a three-vendor world. With revenues passing the half-billion mark, it seems that Informatica is joining the ranks of the big guys after all.

I agree with those in the analyst community who say that Informatica’s purchase of Siperian will be good for both companies. (Check out great posts from Rob Karel and Merv Adrian.) Last year, Informatica’s MDM story verged on the schizophrenic as the company simultaneously advocated a “roll your own” approach to MDM using various software components while at the same time making investments in both Siperian and rival Initiate Systems.

Siperian fills in some significant voids in Informatica’s MDM capabilities, most notably hierarchy management and transaction integration—updating the golden record in real time. While Informatica supports message-based data passing in real time, with Siperian, real-time data requests will soon be a reality. In return, Siperian will now have the power of the Informatica sales force and a new set of prospects in the data integration company’s fiercely loyal customer base.

When Evan and I were writing our book on Customer Data Integration and MDM, we knew we had to write about “the stack” and we knew—despite comprehensive chapters on data governance, data quality, and implementation methodologies—a lot of text would smack of back-office infrastructure. Let’s be honest. Companies that invested in software from Purisma (before D&B acquired them) and Stratature (before they were snapped up by Microsoft) were early adopters. IT organizations that bought these toolsets were laser-focused on narrow, yet high-impact, business problems, and were willing to invest in targeted solutions from smaller niche players.

So we wrote a chapter on making the business case in which we presented a litany of industry-specific MDM value propositions. The truth is that MDM is a business solution, and vendors should sell it accordingly.

Whether you’re tackling state reporting compliance in the pharmaceutical industry, account consolidation in banking, master patient index in healthcare, channel obliteration in retail—the lists go on and on—MDM can solve the problem more quickly and effectively than custom code. Or—as now Informatica would admit—than an ETL tool. As Siperian’s multiple pharmaceutical customers will attest, the ROI for MDM is in the industry business problem.

Informatica CMO Chris Boorman’s spirits were high when I talked to him on Friday. “We’ve thought a lot about MDM as a key piece of our overall data integration strategy,” he said. “And we’ve embraced Siperian’s concept of a ‘trust framework,’ for data. The ability to assign a confidence level to data is a differentiator.”

My confidence level that other MDM acquisitions are on the horizon? High.

Photo by Sreejith K via Flickr (Creative Commons License)