From Building Systems to Governing Data: Where Enterprise IT Is Heading

Over the past decade, enterprise IT meant building systems: ERP, OA, CRM, MES in sequence. Now that most business processes are covered, a different set of problems surface.

Three typical symptoms

• Inconsistent definitions — the same metric shows different values in different systems; meetings open with thirty minutes debating which number is right
• Duplicate capture — the same information is re-entered across departments, burdening frontline staff and creating version conflicts
• Unusable data — data exists but cannot be extracted, is not trusted, and has unknown accuracy

How to respond

The core is master data management and data standards: one data item, one source, captured at origin, shared and reused. This requires organisational push, not just a technical project. Our experience: start with the three to five metrics that generate the most cross-department dispute, build trust through visible results, then expand.