Data Management
Treating data as a strategic asset and developing strategies to glean the greatest possible business value from it.
Data is a critical asset to any business. In our experience, however, data too often is inaccessible, out-dated, wrong, or duplicated - with conflicting instances spread about the same enterprise. This substantially complicates decision-support and frustrates business and IT executives. Many organizations spend millions of dollars either trying to integrate disparate systems or employing staff to manually correct and synchronize data.
Cogentes recently conducted market research with a number of organizations and found this issue to be consistently a problem. Virtually every CIO we interviewed recognized that they had data management issues of one kind or another. For many organizations, resolving their data management issues was a top priority. We observed situations such as:
- Data gets trapped inside “data jails” where only intensive and expensive manual processes allow the data to be shared or reconciled.
- Acquisitions of other businesses lead to incompatible, highly expensive systems that do not share data in the same way. The business feels forced to keep all of these highly expensive, mission-critical, but non-communicative systems in place.
- Customer service representatives use multiple applications during one customer call to access all resources and data in disparate systems.
- Duplicate and conflicting instances of the same data exist in multiple systems.
- Business operations provide constant attention and staff to keep data up-to-date and accurate.
- Business leaders are forced to make decisions without correct, up-to-date and complete data.
- Third-party services and providers, that could enhance products & services, are not able to access and add value to data.
The Cogentes solution
Cogentes addresses these issues by providing expert analysis, creative problem solving, and solutions implementation from our senior consultants. Our approach is to understand how an organization has leveraged its people, process and technology to create value. Specifically, we will:
- Interview key executive and operations staff first and gain a working sense of the business plan objectives.
- Interview IT leaders and understand the IT operations model they have put in place and the history of success of that model.
- Understand the history of investments in people, process, and technology to see what the money path tells us about culture, values and decision-making strategy.
- Analyze everything we learn from the discovery process and uncover where the fundamental disconnects lie between business objectives and the actual operating model.
- Rationalize the best possible approach for closing the gap between the intended results and the actual results of the operating model.
- Create an implementation plan to substantially narrow the gap between intended and actual results by developing new approaches to leveraging people, process and technology.
- Work with our clients to implement the plan we’ve developed.
- Make adjustments to the plan based on actual business operating conditions.
- Monitor the success of the plan over time and continue to refine it as necessary.
