Pulling it all together: a new model, the enterprise data hub, can present a 'single source of truth' without disrupting existing business processes or requiring costly IT reinvestments.

• Author: Yen, Bennet K.
• Position: Enterprise Integration

If yours is like most companies today, it has spent millions of dollars purchasing, implementing and maintaining an extensive set of business applications. But if you were to ask a room full of executives, "Those of you who can achieve a comprehensive view of your business, please raise your hands," it's likely you would see few--if any--hands in the air.

Achieving a "single source of truth" is an uphill battle that companies of all sizes face on a daily basis. Executives are making critical business decisions on intuition rather than on credible information, and the financial and other risks of this all-too-common scenario are startling. Further, federal regulations like The Sarbanes-Oxley Act have essentially created a mandate for complete and accurate data.

Whether it's marketing activities, supply chain operations or the finance department, all facets of an organization rely on customer data in some capacity. However, this very data that is recognized as so critical to the enterprise has been recklessly scattered across the organization due to the decentralized organizational structure of most companies. The result is an organization with departmental silos that do not--and often cannot--share customer information. In addition, each department may "cleanse" and standardize the data at each source separately, which may result in inconsistent and redundant processes, along with significant additional costs.

An architectural innovation, the enterprise data hub model can provide a comprehensive, and cost-efficient, single-source-of-truth solution. Using such a model, all legacy system and third-party information is collected centrally in an online repository, presenting one view across the enterprise.

Within the hub environment, the single source of truth can be achieved without disrupting existing business processes or requiring costly information technology (IT) reinvestments. Furthermore, all data quality and data maintenance services can be centrally maintained and managed with the clean and standardized data flowing throughout the organization and available to all users across all departments.

The conceptual breakthrough in the enterprise data hub comes in understanding that certain data entities are shared resources across an organization. Instead of each department maintaining its own version of a customer record separately, all shared attributes describing the customer record are merged into a single master file. This approach...