March 2015

TDWI E-Book

Master Data Management

Means Business with
Data-Driven Applications
1 Q&A: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Master Data Management

4 Why Your Enterprise Needs a Chief Data Officer

7 Data-Driven Applications and the Dawn of Modern Data

Management

10 About Cognizant and Reltio

Co-sponsored by:

tdwi.org
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
The Rise, Fall, and Rise of
Master Data Management
Naveen Sharma, head of the enterprise data management
practice at Cognizant Technology Solutions, and Manish
Sood, founder and CEO of Reltio, explain how enterprises are
combining reliable and relevant enterprise information and
delivering it to business users faster—and the important (and
changing) role MDM still plays.
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TDWI: How have Cognizant’s recent conversations with clients
about master data management evolved?
Naveen Sharma: At Cognizant, we have architected and deployed
hundreds of MDM projects over the last 10 years. Although these
programs have had varying drivers and have been successful,
the one common theme we’ve seen is always the need to deliver
timely value to the large number of business teams hungry for the
information. Unfortunately, the tools and systems for MDM just
weren’t able to keep up with the demands of agile enterprises. If
not done right, an MDM project could take significant IT resources
and time before the information was supplied to downstream
applications or used for new business initiatives.
In some cases, due to multiple uncoordinated initiatives, a large
enterprise may have several MDM solutions deployed, resulting in the
very silos MDM was intended to prevent. As a result, many business
users have a negative view of MDM and don’t believe it has met
their expectations.
With many of the legacy MDM solutions due to be refreshed and a
plethora of new tools and technologies now available, enterprises
are looking for help in the next stage of their journey. Many
conversations now focus on extracting timely value from all data
types and sources, not just master data. Tools and processes
are expected to manage all information in near real time and the
conversations about evaluating and selecting these tools are now
jointly being driven by business and IT representatives with equal
passion. This is a fundamental shift in thinking for both IT and
business sponsors.
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
What’s driving this shift?
Sharma: We see a convergence of data around people,
organizations, and products (among other factors) driving business
decisions. These connections, when applied to relevant business
contexts, are the very key to unlocking competitive and business
advantage. However, data continues to grow in volume and
relationships are becoming more complex and harder to decipher
and manage. One such example in life sciences involves uncovering
relationships between healthcare professionals and healthcare
organizations, intertwined with a variety of plans and payers. Today,
orchestrating a pharma company’s products and their own sales
teams for maximum effectiveness means more than just mastering
data to produce a single view of the customer or product.
Companies recognize this, which has led to the advent of the role
of chief data officer (CDO), which is either a separate role or a
significant area added to the responsibility of a CIO (see “Why
Your Enterprise Needs a Chief Data Officer,” page 4). CDOs need
complete access and visibility to data from all areas of their
organization in order to create a holistic view of a company’s
business and to support multi-channel or omni-channel
strategies, all while staying compliant amid growing regulatory
scrutiny. As a result, CDOs are looking beyond the gap between
MDM systems traditionally used by IT teams to control data quality
and governance and self-service BI and analytics tools used by
empowered business teams.
Another key CDO mandate is the monetization of data assets.
Enterprises are not only looking to find cost savings and improve
operational efficiency, but also develop new revenue streams. By
refining and building the most comprehensive data sets for internal
use, they open the door to the unlimited potential of licensing their
data externally.
How big is the gap between business needs and IT capabilities?
Sharma: Consumers’ technology experience and the rise of
mobility and social computing continue to permeate the business
environment, fundamentally changing expectations of employees,
customers, and the role of IT. We call this the Monday-morning
shift—consumers come in from the weekend having spent time with
applications such as Facebook and LinkedIn and are then forced to
switch to the legacy systems that power most of IT today.
Employees familiar with consumer data-driven applications such
as LinkedIn and Facebook expect to have similar capabilities and
ease-of-use built into the apps they use for their daily operations.
LinkedIn, for example, provides master data profiles of people and
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organizations and simultaneously—through the same application—
offers relevant insights, such as what jobs might be interesting
to me and who else I should connect with. Users of LinkedIn can
also take action right there and then, which is very different from
enterprise analytics tools that offer insights but don’t explain the
relevance and user actions that must be taken using a separate
application.
For IT, it’s not that simple. Beyond legacy systems that must be
maintained, they also have more data sources, both internal and
external, that need to be reconciled. The reliability of the data is also
not guaranteed by consumer applications such as LinkedIn because
much of the content is essentially self-governed.
Fortunately, the gap is closing. LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, and
Google have “cracked the code” on how to deliver relevant insight
and recommended actions to consumers that has them signing up in
the hundreds of millions and using their applications daily.
Enterprise IT now has access to all the technologies and
environments these consumer giants have. Open source technologies
such as Hadoop and the security and reliability of cloud computing
are paving the way for combining reliable and relevant enterprise
information and delivering it to business users faster than ever.
MDM still plays a key role in this equation but in a more modern and
timely way.
Reltio is focused on “data-driven applications” (DDAs)—not
something that companies think about when they embark on
an MDM initiative. Can you explain the concept and how they
relate?
Manish Sood: As Naveen pointed out, LinkedIn and Facebook
are examples of consumer data-driven applications. They provide
access to and management of master data in the form of profile
information, as well as transaction, interaction, and social data all
within the same application. They also uncover relevant relationships
and connections across people, products, and organizations and use
the information to predict and recommend the best course of action.
There are no SQL queries and no need to understand the underlying
data model or data structures. Business users get their answers,
often before they even ask the question, directly from a single
application. These applications blend both analytical and operational
capabilities and continuously scale to handle millions of records in
real time. They also deliver new capabilities seamlessly to improve
user experience and productivity on a regular basis across a wide
variety of devices.
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
Enterprise data-driven applications represent the best of consumer
data-driven applications with enterprise rigor such as reliable data,
governance, role-level security, and visibility. This is where MDM
returns to prominence, but this time as a foundational component
of data-driven business applications. MDM capabilities such as
address cleansing, match, and merge are dynamically applied to
data from internal and external sources as part of a data-driven
application. Context is also important; enterprise data-driven
applications are designed for business teams with reliable insights
and recommendations that help them meet their business objectives
within the flow of their daily activities. In certain scenarios, they
may even be allowed to contribute to the quality and relevance of
the information by submitting proposed updates and LinkedIn-style
recommendations about data collaboratively.
So many conversations today involve big data. How does this fit
into the equation?
Sood: With big data technologies such as Hadoop popularized by
their use within consumer data-driven applications entering the
enterprise, companies no longer have to worry about how they are
going to manage growing data volume, variety, and velocity. Instead
they’ve turned their attention to effective visualization of the large
data sets for which there is a burgeoning marketplace of tools.
Meanwhile, veracity—really just another “V” word for truthful,
reliable data—continues to be an important component.
Rather than continuing to use relational technologies for master data
and Hadoop and NoSQL databases for high-volume transactional
data, enterprises are starting to think about a modern data
management architecture that can handle all types of data.
Graph technology, for example, is an essential part of what makes
LinkedIn and Facebook so powerful and flexible. Graphing provides
a foundation to handle complex and ever-expanding relationships
between all types of entities. It’s clear that any enterprise data-
driven application should take advantage of graphs and continue to
grow and expand its capabilities as technologies evolve.
How are CDOs getting involved with MDM, big data, and data-
driven applications?
Sood: CDOs understand that data has to be treated as an asset,
and that reliable, related data will deliver exponential value to the
company. They also believe that data cannot be held hostage in silos
and business users need help interpreting the deluge of information
so they can take the right actions based upon the right insight in a
timely manner.
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At the same time, they must grapple with evolving information
governance models and want technology to handle granular access
to information with full audit and accountability to meet regulatory
requirements.
In short, they want to navigate what is a very crowded landscape
of technology and solutions, each with its own unique and distinct
value proposition. Plus, as Naveen mentioned, data monetization is
a game changer. With guaranteed data reliability and continuous
improvement, CDOs can even start to license and deliver information
to external consumers through data-as-a-service (DaaS).
What do Reltio and Cognizant bring to the table for
organizations planning to replace their legacy MDM systems or
embark on MDM for the first time?
Sood: Reltio Cloud combines enterprise data-driven applications
with modern data management for better planning, customer
engagement, and risk management. We give IT streamlined data
management for a complete view across all sources and formats
at scale, while business users such as sales, marketing, and
compliance teams use our data-driven applications to predict,
collaborate, and respond to opportunities in real time.
Through a big data foundation and Reltio’s Commercial Graph,
companies manage all data types including multi-domain master
data, transaction and interaction data, third-party, public, and social
data. By combining operational and analytical silos, we help teams
continuously collaborate to improve the reliability of information,
receive recommendations relevant to their goals, and take immediate
action, all within the same application.
Sharma: Social, mobile, analytics, and cloud technologies can add
a new dimension to businesses and form a new enterprise IT model
to deliver an organization that is more connective, collaborative,
real time, and productive. We believe that Reltio represents a
modern data management solution that can improve upon MDM
capabilities and leapfrog an organization into a new wave of data-
driven applications for their business users. This is also a great
starting point for organizations that are just starting their digital
transformation journey. Having a data-driven application that is
aligned with the business can be a big head start.
Our close partnership allows us to offer the expertise around
technology, integration, and an understanding of how data needs
to blend together with governance and processes in order to be
effective. Together we want to help companies fully realize the value
of MDM and their future data management initiatives across the
enterprise.
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
Why Your Enterprise
Needs a Chief Data
Officer
By Larissa Moss
Peter Aiken, the president of DAMA International, calls data an
“organization’s sole, non-depletable, non-degrading, durable
business asset.” In other words, data is the only business asset
that does not get consumed, its quality does not degrade if properly
cared for, and its value increases with reusability. That begs the
following questions: Should we be managing this asset like other
business assets? Who is the right person to control and manage this
asset—the CIO or do we need a new chief?
IT is not the proper place to control and manage this important
asset as a side activity while building systems. Neither the CIO
nor IT project teams have the knowledge or the authority to define,
standardize, rationalize, and sanitize data assets that are owned by
the business. Looking at any company in any country and assessing
how well their data is being managed as a monetary business asset,
the answer is: not very well or not at all.
Why Are We So Bad at Data Asset Management?
Part of the answer is that data asset management is not taught in
our universities. Universities teach database management systems
such as Oracle or Microsoft. They teach database architectures
like multi-dimensional design. They teach other technology-focused
seminars. They do not teach data asset management.
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Second, most business people do not treat data like a business
asset. They think of data only as a by-product of their processes.
IT owns the “systems” and systems include databases, so business
people just assume that any responsibility for data is an IT
responsibility. The problem with that assumption is that technicians
like “technology,” and they see the world through technology-colored
glasses. In fact, studies show that fewer than 10 percent of IT
professionals have the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for
data asset management.
CIOs are no more data knowledgeable than are technicians. After
all, CIOs do not create the data, they do not use the data, and they
certainly do not define the data. They do not create the business
rules or policies for data, and they usually do not monitor the quality
of the data. So that begs the question: Why are CIOs expected to
control and manage data assets?
Why Can’t a CIO in IT Manage Data Assets?
The answer is multifaceted. First, IT does not feel the true impact of
poor data asset management. In other words, the business side is
much more exposed to their customers and business partners and
they will suffer publicly from data problems.
IT does not know the organizational business rules that govern data.
In other words, IT resources do not study the data from all business
angles and they do not know what the rules and policies for data
should be outside of how it is used on their current project.
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
IT does not control access to data subject matter experts. These
data experts are on the business side and do not report to IT, so IT
cannot simply assign them to projects to study the data.
Only the business is authorized to define data and its use. The
business originates the data, the business defines the data, the
business uses the data, and the business owns the data. It is the
business with ultimate authority over data, not IT. IT’s primary
function is to leverage technology, not data.
If all of these reasons don’t convince you, let’s compare the role of
a CIO to other “chief” roles, such as COO, CFO, and CRO. What do
these other chiefs have in common?
First, each of the other chiefs is responsible for one and only one
well-defined subject area. A CFO is responsible for financial assets
and nothing else. A COO is responsible for business operations
and nothing else. A CRO is responsible for risk management and
nothing else.
These chiefs are the most knowledgeable executives for their subject
area. They have formal education in their subject area and usually
have some certification or formal recognition of their training (for
example, a CFO likely has a CPA license and an MBA degree). All of
this gives them the knowledge, skills, and ability to perform their
chief jobs.
All of these chiefs have ultimate authority over the assets in their
job title: a CFO has the final say over financial assets; a COO has
the final say over business operations, and so on.
Now, let’s look at the CIO role. CIOs do not have responsibility for
only one well-defined subject area. Instead, they are responsible
for all technology, all development, and all the data. Of the three
responsibilities, data is the last they care about because their
primary responsibilities are technology and systems.
Having intimate knowledge of business data in the industry where
they work is not a job requirement.
CIOs have no special expertise in data asset management because
most have never worked as data management professionals before,
except as DBAs or database architects. They also never had any
formal education or certification in data asset management. That
leaves them with no specialized knowledge, skills, and ability to
manage data as a business asset.
We must conclude that a CIO is not the best qualified person to
control and manage the company’s data assets.
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What Are the Qualifications for a CDO?
A CDO has a four-year bachelor’s degree in finance, business
administration, or computer science. In addition, he or she should
be a certified data management professional (CDMP). This gives the
CDO the necessary knowledge, skills, and ability to manage data as
an asset.
A CDO has at least 10 (and preferably 15) years of relevant hands-
on experience in data governance, business architectures, quality
engineering, or a field related to data asset management.
A CDO has expert data knowledge of the industry. For example, a
CDO at a bank must have a financial background, and a CDO at an
insurance company must have worked in insurance for many years.
This is a business executive who has the ultimate authority over
data assets, just like the CFO is a business executive with the
ultimate authority over financial assets.
A CDO is responsible for one and only one well-defined subject area,
namely data assets. Being data knowledgeable definitely is a job
requirement. Having a technology background is not.
What Is a CDO Responsible For?
A CDO puts together a new data strategy for the company’s data
assets.
A CDO defines and implements an enterprisewide data governance
program that will involve business people as well as data
management professionals from the CDO’s own staff.
Because metadata is the DNA (documentation, navigation,
administration) of data asset management, especially business
metadata, a metadata repository is purchased, or built, and
experienced metadata administrators are hired.
A CDO’s staff develops standards, processes, procedures, and
guidelines for data quality, data modeling, data reuse, data security
and privacy, and everything to do with data.
Finally, the CDO is responsible for managing development projects
that involve cross-functional data integration, such as BI/DW
projects, reference and MDM projects, customer-specific projects
such as CRM and CDI, and document and content (or knowledge)
management.
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer Data-Driven Apps About Cognizant and Reltio

What Is the CDO’s Reporting Structure? Larissa Moss is founder and president of Method Focus Inc. She
started her IT career over 30 years ago, and has spent over 20
The CDO reports to the CEO, not to IT. Managing data assets is an
years in data warehousing and business intelligence. She is a
ongoing program with an enterprise perspective, and therefore,
favorite speaker at TDWI, DAMA, and IQ conferences in the U.S. and
it should not be part of or tied to short-term IT projects with
Europe on topics including data warehousing, business intelligence,
aggressive deadlines.
master data management, agile DW project management, spiral DW
A CDO’s staff includes: methodologies, enterprise information architecture, data integration,
• Enterprise architects, both technical and business architects, and data quality.
such as information architects and database architects
• Metadata administrators responsible for maintaining the
metadata in the metadata repository
• Enterprise information management (EIM) professionals—
individuals who know business modeling techniques and are
familiar with industry standards for data naming, taxonomies,
semantic modeling, and business process reengineering
• Developers who work on enterprise-class data integration
projects, such as ETL developers and BI solution architects
A CDO also has an indirect relationship with IT’s data custodians,
those staff members from the IT department for technical support
and maintenance. If the company chooses to keep the data
integrators and data developers in IT, then there would be a second
indirect relationship between that group and the CDO.
On the business side, a CDO has indirect working relationships with
data scientists, data miners, business analysts, and especially with
data owners and data stewards who must actively participate in
data asset management activities.

A Final Word
With the proper credentials, experience, and staff, your chief data
officer can be a valued asset to your organization, controlling and
managing your enterprise’s valuable assets not as a sideline job but
as a dedicated professional.

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 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
Data-Driven Applications
and the Dawn of Modern
Data Management
Why enterprises must face the realities of modern data
management, and how data-driven applications can help.
In one way or another, enterprises have been grappling with master
data problems for decades.
By the late 1990s, however, master data issues had reached a
critical point, owing chiefly to rapid uptake of ERP applications in
the years leading up to Y2K. The ERP paradigm replaced a status
quo in which businesses were struggling to manage multiple
process- or domain-specific applications running on a mix of
different platforms. ERP was supposed to drastically simplify
this, inasmuch as it prescribed a set of standard APIs to which
organizations could program and a single, standard interface for
data access. Its efficacy in both respects has been questionable
at best.
What isn’t questionable is that the rapid pace of ERP adoption
engendered a host of new problems and, in hindsight, helped
exacerbate a number of existing problems—including that of
inconsistent master data. Take it from Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio
Inc., which bills itself as a provider of enterprise data-driven
applications that have reliable master data built in. Sood was one of
the movers and shakers in the market for master data management
(MDM) products that emerged in the early 2000s. (He worked for
more than 10 years in a management position with Siperian, a
seminal MDM vendor that Informatica acquired in early 2010.) In
other words, Sood knows whereof he speaks.
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“These [ERP] applications delivered value by automating and
improving the efficiency of core business processes within each
organizational unit, sales, marketing, and manufacturing, each
maintaining their own master data sets,” he explains, adding that—
far from reducing or eliminating siloing—ERP apps paradoxically
created new siloing issues.
“Companies with multiple ERP applications had a problem. These
silos with their own versions of people, product, organizations,
and other data profiles were sometimes inaccurate and always
inconsistent. To make matters worse, large enterprises would often
have multiple versions of these applications across divisions and
geographies, creating quite a mess and challenge,” he says.
Messy Master Data—By Design
To counter this, the first few years of the new millennium saw the
emergence of MDM pure-play vendors such as Siperian, Initiate
Systems, DWL, and others. (All three were quickly acquired by larger,
data-integration-oriented vendors—namely, Informatica and IBM.)
Most early MDM solutions focused on customer data integration
(CDI), chiefly because that’s where the most immediate pain was.
“The goal was to solve the problem by bringing together customer
data across these disparate sources into a central hub that
all applications could rely on. This was accomplished by either
physically creating a single persisted master record or just storing
key attributes and linking back to the applications that held the rest
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
of the data,” Sood explains, noting that this paradigm, which was
powered by batch ETL processes and in-loop data quality routines
(and which often mixed in data from third-party sources), placed a
premium on governance as a means to ensure both the security and
compliance of data.
“[This] led to often religious debates around the ‘styles’ of hubs, and
the way in which tools performed key processes such as match and
merge or link.”
The upshot, Sood argues, is that not only did the MDM market
consolidate, but that—as a function of this consolidation—the
MDM paradigm itself continued to fragment in the different ways of
“doing” MDM. “Most implementations over the last 10 years remain
rooted in technology from the original wave of leading systems,” he
argues.
This phenomenon had another important implication, too, Sood
notes: first-generation MDM technologies are human- and
technology-resource intensive, which means that—for all practical
purposes—they’re primarily designed for “large enterprises with big
IT teams and deep pockets.”
MDM at a Crossroads
First-generation MDM tools helped, in a real sense, to address
critical customer pain points.
However, the MDM of the early 2000s was in no sense a silver bullet.
For one thing, it entailed a huge upfront investment in terms of
buy-in and planning. What’s more, first-generation architectures
framed MDM as a separate problem—i.e., as something distinct
from business problems or business processes. Next-generation
approaches to MDM treat master data consistency as something
that’s “baked into” a business problem or business process,
Sood says.
On top of this, the dominant MDM paradigm tends to frustrate the
very people it’s supposed to help—users of downstream business
applications—owing both to the complexity of its back-office
functions and the time it takes to implement MDM systems. To this
day, time-to-value remains an Achilles’ heel that’s basically a part of
the traditional MDM architecture, Sood argues.
“MDM focused on improving the quality of the data through
automated data source matching/merging, supplemented by data
stewards who manually adjudicated a percentage of records that
were too close to call,” he says. “Business users ... have been
frustrated by what they believe to be less-than-stellar data quality
and responsiveness to issues.”
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One of the main factors—and the reason Sood believes the MDM
space stands at a crossroads—is that existing tools tend to be
prohibitively costly to own and maintain. Most MDM tools are
designed with the status quo ante in mind—but the new status quo
is at once more egalitarian and more complex.
“[B]ig data technologies such as Hadoop and the availability of
elastic cloud computing have completely transformed the way all
types of data can be efficiently managed,” he says. “This has
driven down cost [with the result that] for the first time, master
data management is now within the reach of companies of all sizes
through a next generation of cloud-based solutions.”
The New Synthesis
This is why Sood believes MDM stands at a proverbial crossroads.
“Should organizations that have made investments in legacy MDM
technologies transition [or] migrate to new technologies—or stay
with an aging [MDM] infrastructure that’s actually [prohibitively]
costly to maintain?” he asks.
It isn’t just MDM that’s at a crossroads, however; data management
itself must change, Sood argues.
One reason for this is that traditional data management is
predicated on a very specific understanding of how data should
be produced, disseminated, and managed. It’s optimized for the
production and management of consistent, structured data, regular
(albeit increasingly accelerated) batch windows, and snapshot views
of data at rest. The new status quo—what Sood and Reltio call
“modern data management”—is one in which data of different
shapes, sizes, and types—from relational, structured data to semi-
structured or even unstructured data—pulses or streams into the
enterprise.
In this new paradigm, the fixed relational data model no longer
imposes hard constraints on how data must be ingested,
represented, and managed. Schema-optional platforms such as
Hadoop make it possible to land or store data without predefining
schema. Instead, schema can be imputed or derived later, when
data is read or retrieved. Sood cites Reltio’s platform as an example:
it leverages the Apache Cassandra database in combination with
graph technology to derive and describe real-world relationships
between entities—along with baked-in data quality, master data
management, and other data-management-oriented amenities.
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer Data-Driven Apps About Cognizant and Reltio

Finally, a focus on data quality and governance is core to Sood’s Sood pairs his vision of LinkedIn- or Facebook-like data-driven
and Reltio’s vision of this modern data management paradigm. applications with that of the modern data management paradigm,
“Today’s modern data management supports collaborative curation which he says provides a secure foundation that enables data-
or crowdsourcing from business users without sacrificing the MDM driven applications to blend data from multiple sources—including,
discipline of traditional data stewarding,” he indicates. especially, from third-party and public/social sources through
data-as-a-service. “Data can be combined and brought together to
In addition to transforming the practice and scope of MDM—e.g.,
uncover relationships and insights. Any number of applications can
it’s no longer necessary to maintain MDM as a separate practice,
be ... created to use this data. The applications are unconstrained
nor to predetermine an enterprisewide “view” of master data—the
by data type and source, can provide both analytical insight and
modern data management paradigm enables a new, fundamentally
operational execution, and have master data management reliability
different class of application, he argues. “[A]pplications [can] be
as a backbone,” he says.
developed for business initiatives that were previously either unmet
or force-fitted into packaged applications,” he argues, citing the “Unlike traditional applications that are designed primarily to
misuse of packaged CRM for apps such as affiliation and/or key- capture information or analytics that only provide generic insights,
account management in the life sciences industry: “[U]ntil now, data-driven applications provide information in context for the
companies have had to make do with CRM solutions that were not a business user with recommendations they can execute on within
good fit for those specific business objectives.” the same application. Results are then correlated back, closing
the loop to accurately measure effectiveness, and improve future
recommendations for better business outcomes.”
Keep the Customer Satisfied
On the other hand, it isn’t enough simply to spin up an MDM service
in the cloud, to rapidly populate and fill a big data lake, or—the
go-to move in BI these days—to outfit business analysts or data
scientists with self-service visualization tools. What’s needed, Sood
urges, is an enterprise-grade data-driven application that’s designed
with the capabilities of modern data management.
Think LinkedIn for the enterprise. Such apps must be able to
consume reliable data from multiple sources while providing
relevant insights and recommending actions. Sood contrasts this
model with that of traditional decision-support apps—or, for that
matter, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as
Salesforce.com and Workday—that are process driven and designed
to work primarily with data from structured or relational sources.
“[Traditional] applications sit on top of a relational data model that
can be extended by adding new tables and fields,” he maintains.
“Eventually, such applications are either retired due to the changing
needs of the business or are replaced with ones that provide more
efficiency and functionality.”

9  TDWI e - book M aster Data M a n agement Me a ns Business with Data - Dri v en A pplications
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer
www.cognizant.com
Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information
technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services,
dedicated to helping the world’s leading companies build stronger
businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant
combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology innovation,
deep industry and business process expertise, and a global,
collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work. With over
75 development and delivery centers worldwide and approximately
211,000 employees as of January 1, 2015, Cognizant is a member
of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and
the Fortune 500 and is ranked among the top performing and
fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at
www.cognizant.com or follow us on Twitter: @Cognizant.
Our solutions cover the life cycle of information utilization, from
ideation to implementation to value creation. Cognizant consultants
help define your MDM strategy and solution architecture. We then
help identify and combine the types of data available within your
company and from outside sources—including social media—to
create a “Data to Foresight” continuum.
10  TDWI e - book M aster Data M a n agement Me a ns Business with Data - Dri v en A pplications
Data-Driven Apps About Cognizant and Reltio
www.reltio.com
Reltio delivers reliable data, relevant insights, and recommended
actions so companies can be right faster. Reltio Cloud combines
data-driven applications with modern data management for better
planning, customer engagement, and risk management.
IT streamlines data management for a complete view across
all sources and formats at scale, while sales, marketing, and
compliance teams use data-driven applications to predict,
collaborate, and respond to opportunities in real time.
Reltio manages all data types including multi-domain master data,
transaction and interaction data, as well as third party, public,
and social data. Data is fused into a new breed of data-driven
applications that business teams love to use every day. By combining
operational and analytical silos, teams can continuously collaborate
to improve the reliability of information, receive recommendations
relevant to their goals, and take immediate action, all within the
same application.
Companies of all sizes, including leading Fortune 500 companies
in healthcare and life sciences, distribution, and retail rely on
Reltio. Reltio has several partnerships with leading third-party data
providers, systems integrators, and solution partners.
For more information, visit www.reltio.com.
 Expert Q&A Chief Data Officer Data-Driven Apps About Cognizant and Reltio

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11  TDWI e - book M aster Data M a n agement Me a ns Business with Data - Driv en A pplications