After a tumultuous and extremely challenging 2009, enterprises are looking to this year as beacon of recovery and relative economic calm. This article presents three trends that we're seeing for the data management industry in 2010.

Trend #1

Going Green – In Every Way – Through IT Modernization
Companies in 2010 are facing two sometimes competing goals – how to increase profitability in a down economy while also working on initiatives to become more environmentally friendly.  The prospect of “going green” while “making green” is often hard to do, but there is one method that progressive companies are taking.  By consolidating data on customers, products, materials, assets and other data sets onto a smaller number of systems, organizations can slash the costs of keeping multiple business applications running… and reduce energy consumption along the way.

Trend #2

The Long, Complicated Journey to Transparency
As the Recovery.gov initiative showed, the desire to be transparent and an organization’s ability to make it happen are sometimes not aligned.  One thing inhibiting both public and private sector organizations from their transparency goals is multiple, disparate and competing views of information across the enterprise.  The resulting view is confusing at best, which defeats the very reason that information is being released (consumption and comprehension).  Through techniques like data governance and data synchronization, organizations can bridge the gap between different data sources and build a more unified view of data – fuelling more effective transparency initiatives.

Trend #3

Detecting and Eliminating Fraudulent Activity
One of the problems with using more enterprise applications to manage the business is that a more complex IT infrastructure makes it harder to track activity across systems.  For example, a medical claim posted in one department may or may not get reviewed by another department since their operational systems don’t “talk” to one another.  For industries like healthcare, pharmaceutical and financial services, there is a real need to identify and eradicate duplicate or fraudulent spending.  But, without a set of data management processes and technologies in place, it’s nearly impossible to do this without manually reviewing transactions.

A Foundation of Actionable Information

Overall, 2010 will be a pivotal year for communication – between government agencies, between business and IT users in the enterprise and between critical information and data monitoring systems. To do this, you have to have good, reliable data about programs, citizens, organizations and other arenas, or you will just communicate bad or misleading details. We have an opportunity to move beyond the fear of change originally spurred by an unpredictable economy and create stronger, more resilient organizations built upon a foundation of actionable information.

SOURCE: 2010 Data Management Trends