Like most parents, for many years I was subjected to hours of torturous car journeys listening to “the Kids CD.” Parents, Uncles, Aunts and older siblings will be familiar with the sing-song voices of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Old Macdonald had a Farm” accompanied by a happy-clapping, synth-based soundtrack. Thankfully, my kids are now older and it’s been a few years since I’ve had to endure “the kids’ CD.”
But, a couple of weeks ago, while discussing reference data strategy with an investment firm, I was reminded of one of my kids’ all-time favourites, “The Wise Man and the Foolish Man,” and it prompted me to write this blog.
In short, the song tells the story of the “foolish man who built his house upon the sand” while the “wise man built his house upon the rock.” Well, you can guess what happened when the “rain came tumbling down.”
The investment firm I was recently speaking to have a similar problem.
Several years ago they implemented a solution to manage their securities reference data. However, this so-called solution turned out to be a toolkit that required extensive customization and, because of the system’s limitations, is no longer fit for purpose.
The problem is that the system had been implemented to solve a specific business problem.
But, as the business grew, both organically and through acquisitions, the system has proved unable to adapt to the evolving business requirements that had resulted from these structural changes. Consequently, the firm went down the road of replicating core data into multiple silos, and then adding and customizing attributes as needed.
Whilst this did the job for a time, it soon became apparent that the overhead of scaling a system in this way was ballooning, as more and more people were needed to manage, support and control these multiple systems.
Then came the rain….regulation, regulation, regulation.
Today, the firm is still running multiple systems and managing multiple Gold copies. The only way to consolidate would be to effectively rip up the existing architecture and start again. Their only viable solution is to offshore as much of the work as possible in the hope that continuing to throw resources at the problem will keep the lights on.
Because they adopted a toolkit approach, the firm has had to map each individual data item from the ground up. The result is a highly customized solution, which has been uniquely tailored to serve the business at one specific point in time. And as the sands have shifted, they’ve been left trying to prop up their house to prevent it from collapsing.
But it could have been so different….
At GoldenSource, significant time and research has gone into ensuring that our “house” is built on the most solid of foundations. This solid foundation is the GoldenSource Data Model, the industry’s leading, proven data architecture. What’s more, we’ve developed built-in configurability and extensible fields that can provide the flexibility required without sacrificing stability and performance. So when the rain comes, you can be sure that the roof of your business won’t fall in.
Contact us to learn more