Driving Data Integrity and Its Ability for Effective Deployment

Data integrity is the lifeblood of today’s successful organizations, and it needs to be treated and managed with the same care as an organization’s products and services. It serves as the foundation for operational reporting, analytics, as well as providing timely information to make better decisions and drive organizational behaviors. Simply stated, "data and its ability to be accurate and accessed in a timely manner, is essential in today’s marketplace".

Leading organizations seeking to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are profiling their data at deployment sites well in advance of formally enlisting them with traditional ERP activities. Having the foresight and discipline to foundationally put data front and center of an ERP engagement provides key opportunities to accelerate an area that has traditionally lagged the progress of other teams from a program timeline perspective. The intelligent enterprise is now looking to break those traditional paradigms, shifting to control profiling activities leveraging a variety of tools and techniques more proactively and thoroughly, to help optimize and improve the speed at which data is extracted, transformed, enriched, and loaded.

A key aspect in deploying a profiling tool is starting with the right organizational and program structure. Intelligent companies looking to accelerate progress while increasing delivery predictability are bolstering their data teams with sufficient business representation. Leading practice is having at least one person responsible from the business per data object (sometimes more depending on the cross—functionality of the object) while pairing them with a representative from the client IT conversion team and adding in someone who understands the target rules necessary to convert to the new ERP system – ERP Consultant. This ‘3-in-the-box’ structure allows the business data owner to focus on a specific object or group of objects to cleanse, extract, enrich, and transform while working in conjunction with a programmer who translates the business rules into programmatic rules necessary to get data from source to target effectively.

Once the right organizational structure is determined for data (as well as communicated and understood!), it’s essential to evaluate the different entities involved in terms of where the data sits. Many organizations are choosing to take on a ‘worst case’ situation with regards to data cleanliness to strengthen the effectiveness of the profiling tool up front within the context of the overall deployment plan. The idea is to find as many data permutations as possible in the beginning, thus accelerating the entire data process for what is likely fewer Cleanse Extract Transform Enrich Load IT -Legacy (Build: Cleanse, Extract) IT -ERP (Build: Transform, Enrich & Load) Business (Define: Cleanse, Transform & Enrich) problematic entities throughout the duration of the deployment sequence. Additionally, the stronger the profiling tool is in the beginning of the deployment plan, the more it will pay dividends throughout the deployment lifecycle. This in turn allows for the data team to act more as a service provider across deployments moving from deployment to deployment well in advance of the traditional deployment activities commence across the other workstreams and functions.