Have you begun to see the value of Enterprise Data Management? If so, perhaps you’ve decided that simply buying more hardware is no longer a viable option for your IT department. Despite the ever-falling cost of hardware, each new machine you add will increase your labor, power, and cooling costs over time.

1. YOUR ENTERPRISE DATA
MANAGEMENT CHECKLIST
WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN AN EDM SOLUTION AND IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER
INTRODUCTION
Have you begun to see the value of Enterprise Data Management? If so, perhaps you’ve decided that simply buying
more hardware is no longer a viable option for your IT department. Despite the ever-falling cost of hardware, each new
machine you add will increase your labor, power, and cooling costs over time.
Perhaps your company is also suffering from the effects of data cholesterol—a situation in which the excessive buildup
of data leads to sluggishness across production systems. Data cholesterol causes slower response times for queries,
lengthens testing and reporting, and ripples through everything you do in IT—forcing you to use more labor to support
your infrastructure.
And if your company is like most, you’re doing business in an increasingly stringent regulatory environment. If you keep
huge volumes of data around, you’ll have to make it available in the event of litigation or regulatory audits. Why not pare
down any unneeded data and avoid these unwanted complications?
The central goal of EDM is to establish a set of repeatable, documented processes that help your organization make
informed data management decisions. But before you launch your EDM project, there are two things you should
consider:
FIRST, FIND A SOLUTION THAT MEETS YOUR NEEDS
At a high level, your company is pursuing EDM because you want to manage data growth, non-production data, data
privacy, and application retirement. But you may also seek to:
 Make information-based decision making a core part of your corporate DNA.
 Drive changes in business outcomes by leveraging information effectively.
 Maintain an enterprise view of information across applications, data stores, and channels.
 Help your executives focus on analytical capabilities as a core competency.
 Imbed quantitative analytical and intelligence capabilities in your company culture.
 Become an established market leader that wins through better insight and intelligence about customers.
 Manage data proactively in a lifecycle with a corporate data repository.

2. SECOND—AND EQUALLY IMPORTANTLY, FIND A PARTNER THAT CAN IMPLEMENT YOUR
CHOSEN SOLUTION EFFECTIVELY.
The benefits of working with the right partner include:
 Predictability in your implementations and upgrades, thus lowering your risk.
 Transparency throughout projects, so you know your project status each step of the way.
 Alignment of your IT plans with your solution vendor’s product plans.
 Quick turnaround on core product issues and enhancement requests.
 Effective knowledge transfer to your IT staff and end users, optimizing their productivity.
 Practical guidance in planning product upgrades.
 Quick implementation at a reasonable price.
Let’s look at the criteria for finding a solution and implementation partner that meet your needs.
FINDING THE RIGHT EDM SOLUTION
Focus your search for a solution by assessing capabilities in the areas of data growth management, test data
management, data privacy management, and application retirement management.
Data Growth Management Requirements
Ability to maintain the data archive as a database or compressed file.
Ability to access data with your standard reporting tools.
Ability to archive applications from a wide range of data sources, software platforms, and
application packages or custom applications.
Ability to archive historical data safely to a secure archive.
Flexibility to archive specific data based on your rules and criteria.
Retention, archive, and purge orchestration.
Proactive storage planning.
Ability to comply with audit and regulatory requirements (such as Sarbanes-Oxley).
Security of archive data to restrict access to authorized people only.
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3. Test Data Management Requirements
Ability to compare “before” and “after” images of the test data.
Ability to apply standard subsetting practices to any enterprise application, package or custom, on
any software platform and any database.
Subset capabilities to create realistic and manageable test databases.
Ability to quickly and easily refresh test environments.
Ability to edit data to create targeted test cases.
Ability to build a library of subset selection criteria, and reuse them on demand.
Data Privacy Management Requirements
Enterprise-strength data masking solution.
Provides a platform to implement corporate privacy policies to all applications consistently,
regardless of software platform or database.
Ability to mask data consistently across applications containing data that needs to be synchronized.
Offers intelligent masking routines, out-of-the-box, beyond scrambling.
Ability to generate fictionalized account numbers, customer names, and addresses.
Ability to perform custom masking.
Application Retirement Management Requirements
Enables you to report against retired data using your standard reporting tools.
Ability to proactively manage retired data as a corporate asset in a single repository.
Ability to archive data in its original business context.
Ability to preserve each archived business object as an audit-ready “snapshot in time.”
Specific archive and retrieval capabilities that address data retention compliance needs.
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4. FINDING THE RIGHT EDM IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER
Begin your search for an EDM implementation partner by assessing each vendor’s relevant experience,
and then evaluate the services they offer.
Experience Requirements
Experience implementing EDM solutions (minimum requirement).
Experience implementing your chosen EDM solution with the business applications in your
environment (recommended requirement).
Services Requirements: Project Planning
Plans and launches the project.
Trains you and your team on the flow of a typical implementation.
Installs and configures the software.
Enables time savings and risk reduction throughout the project.
Provides you with a checklist of items to be completed prior to their arrival onsite.
Services Requirements: Requirements Analysis
Determines your data archiving and/or sub-setting requirements in detail.
Familiarizes your team with the solution to be implemented.
Facilitates analysis sessions to determine which critical decisions need to be made regarding the
architecture to be used.
Provides a walk-through of business application flows, and identifies requirements and best practices
to be implemented.
Services Requirements: Design and Build
Designs and builds the artifacts to support your data archiving and/or sub-setting requirements.
Validates your application data structures and archived data reporting needs, as determined during
Requirements Analysis.
Makes any required changes to the configuration of the archive/extract definitions.
Designs custom extensions.
Refines technical architecture design.
Includes data transformation rules (typically used for test data management/data privacy projects).
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5. Services Requirements: Test and Validate
Tests the solution in a non-production environment to establish the strategy to be used to move the
solution to production.
Performs both modular and integrated testing.
Verifies that the proposed solution is ready for production use.
Services Requirements: Project Transition
Assesses production readiness.
Finalizes the production deployment plan.
Trains IT staff and end users who will use the solution.
Transitions the management of the solution to client staff.
Provides support to the team during an initial period, including internal support escalation during
production.
CONCLUSION
By choosing the right EDM solution and working with the right implementation partner, you can begin to
effectively manage data growth, non-production data, data privacy, and application retirement across your
enterprise.
Estuate is IBM’s go-to partner for the implementation of IBM® Optim Solutions for custom applications, Oracle
E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards. We work closely with IBM account teams to meet our
mutual clients’ Enterprise Data Management needs.
To discuss your EDM project plans, please call Estuate at (408) 400-0680
or email sales@estuate.com
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