Blog: William McKnight

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2007 Predictions for Information Management

It’s time for a look at the industry of information management and its direction with some predictions for 2007. This is going to take a few blog entries, but I’ll start with five trends.

1. Continued support of the end-user experience. Business Objects’ Intelligent Query and Encyclopedia are good examples of usability products that go well beyond the typical drag and drop interface. Without tools like the evolution of these tools, and others, in the market, users need to know what they are looking for, need training, and need to know how to navigate metadata to become effective. Many drop out of the parade too early with these requirements. What tools that want to be adopted en masse in 2008 need to do now is begin to apply search technology to the user experience. Think Google for BI.

2. Data Governance and Stewardship. Nice balances of responsibilities are finally grudgingly being formed in organizations between business side and IT side interests. Governance and Stewardship are working, with governance being the higher-level, direction-setting body and stewardship from the business being a part of the extended build team, directing transformation rules and quality efforts.

3. Master Data Management. 2007 will see the perfect storm that launches MDM efforts deeper into the ‘type A’ organization struggling with mastering customer, product, parts and other data. Realizing the data warehouse is too late in the lifecycle to be effective doing this, we will see more efforts labeled MDM take up the charge. This may come in the form of a subset of functions of a real/right-time data warehouse, but more commonly, it will be hub and EII/SOA-based architectures promoted by the burgeoning MDM software industry.

4. EII. As an enabler of virtual integration, this maligned industry will see more acceptance in 2007 as their capabilities have grown, leaving some data standing pat physically where it is, but vastly increasing its usability in cultures pursuing information leadership.

5. Offshoring information management settles in. Vendors and consultancies lick their wounds from offshored failures to figure it out. Apparently, it’s more complex and business-oriented than first thought. At some point after 2007, the drum will beat loudly again and balanced approaches may succeed where all-or-nothing approaches failed.

Technorati tags: Information Management, EII, Offshoring, Master Data Management, Data Governance, Stewardship

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