EDM and EDW

Scott Gnau and Ron Swift of Teradata wrote a nice piece in DM Review that I saw today - 2006 Information Technology Trends for CIOs

They talk about competing on analytics - quoting Tom Davenport's interesting article on this subject about which I have already blogged. They go on to highlight a number of trends that will drive the adoption of an Enterprise Data Warehouse. These include a number that intersect with EDM - Compliance, SOA, improving business processes

Two other specific points seem relevant

We also predict that rules-driven, event-triggered, exception-based reporting will go mainstream. Process owners will adopt event detection to optimize a variety of business processes

Another key use for EDM technologies - rules, leveraging predictive analytics, making better decisions.

Real-Time IT Must Drive Decisions and Results
At the core of this will be the near-real time EDW. Intelligence must come to decision-makers in a dynamic context that's unforgiving of data latency, which becomes decision-making latency, which becomes tactical execution latency, which in turn becomes a cycle of missed opportunities for the business. Lost minutes can lose millions. Advanced analytics in near-real time on an EDW will certainly become perhaps the single most important driver of success in 2006 and the foreseeable future.

If you believe this, and I am inclined to, then you need to think about how to bring these real-time, advanced analytics to bear on operational systems and the (often more junior) staff that use them. This is where EDM comes in and why EDM and EDW are such complementary approaches. It is also, of course, why Fair Isaac and Teradata partner.