Shankar RamaNathan

Successful Enterprises compete on many capabilities ranging from product excellence, customer service and marketing to name a few. Increasingly the back office / Information Technology (IT) is becoming a strategic player in the Digital Business Model which supports these key capabilities. In other words back office/IT Capability itself is becoming a differentiator. All of the […]

In my earlier post Why MDM should be part of CRM Strategy I discussed the importance of having a MDM strategy along with the CRM initiative. Proliferation of cloud CRM solutions like Salesforce is a blessing and it can also be an IT nightmare, if it is not managed properly.  In many companies Salesforce implementation […]

Moving the MDM deployment to a cloud platform involves several considerations ranging from technical gotchas to getting the internal buy-in. Getting the buy-in is a different topic of discussion – see my earlier posts on Data Governance. The advantages of moving to cloud eliminates some of the administrative and server farms related maintenance tasks but […]

As Master Data Management matures and becomes a standard application within the enterprise architecture landscape, variations of cloud offerings are slowly emerging. Many companies are not even aware of these solution offerings. You can broadly classify the types of cloud offerings into 3 categories. There are key advantages and disadvantages in pursuing these architectures. The […]

In numerous client engagements, we have witnessed that Data Quality (DQ) is a never-ending battle. At many companies,  IT fixes and re-fixes the data rather than develop solutions and manage applications. DQ is not confined to IT, but maintaining that quality requires effort from all data users, especially those at the business end. Building a […]

In the Big Data world Lambda architecture created by Nathan Marz is a standard technique applied to solve many predictive analytics problems. This architecture effectively delivers the streaming data and batch data to combine the past information with the current changes, producing a comprehensive platform for predictive framework. Lambda Architecture On a very high generic […]

As I mentioned in my earlier post, building the vision for Data Governance happens through multiple meetings, interactions and discussions at various levels. Depending on the company culture and type of industry, progress may end up being faster or slower. Leadership in building the awareness and linking the business issues which can be solved through […]

A lot has been said and written about Data Governance (DG) and the importance of having one. However it is still a mystery for many companies to create an effective DG. Based on our experience majority of the companies in their early stages of DG fall into one of these areas: Had too many false […]

We are almost at the end of 2014. Time to check out the 2015 trends and compare with what has been the focus in 2014. Looking at the top 10 trends in Information Management, some things have changed and some have moved up or down the list. However, the same old challenges pretty much remain. […]

Lot of people confuse the Master Data Management with CRM. Gartner defines the ‘Three Rings of Information Governance’ where and what type of data is captured and how it relates to the core enterprise data (Master Data). Master Data is the common set of definitions agreed across the Enterprise. According to Gartner, The inner ring […]

Big Data is big deal. Every vendor has a strategy and a suite of products. Navigating the maze and picking the right Big Data platform and tools takes some level of planning and looking beyond techie’s dream product suite. Compounding the issue is the open source option vs. going with a vendor version of the […]

When Apple jumped into the payment processing with ApplePay, I thought this would be a great leg up for Apple. But who will be the winner and who will be the loser? Granted the payment switches from the credit card to ApplePay which indirectly pays for the purchase, who cares as long as we can […]