CHAPTER 15
Proactive Organizations: Bridging the Chasm and Becoming Proactive
We cannot cross that bridge until we come to it, but I always like to lay down a pontoon ahead of time.
—BERNARD BARUCH
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
The move to the proactive stage is the hardest transition for a company to make. Reactive organizations, after all, still have a number of informational silos such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and other enterprise applications that manage a functional area.
In this chapter, organizations will learn how to start viewing data as a shared resource. This is an important step to start profiting from master data management (MDM) technologies designed around domain-specific groups such as customers, products, suppliers, or assets. Reaching this stage requires diplomacy and leadership skills to push back on those who are more comfortable with information silos.
This chapter will review several critical integration steps for proactive organizations that are necessary: domain data models, business data services, data delivery and business user interfaces, utilizing data services, data steward tools, and data federation and data synchronization technologies. These technologies need to be integrated into the proactive organization.
REMEMBER
1. Data quality and data governance should never be considered a one-time project. A quality culture must be established as an ongoing, continuous process.
2. No organization can tackle enterprise-wide ...

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