Successful organizations today are improving their competitive advantage in the marketplace and boosting their bottom line by treating information as an enterprise asset. Data, like any other enterprise asset, requires careful management in order to realize its full value and opportunity to the organization. Enterprise data can support an organization’s strategic vision by helping to develop a plan, forecast future trends, identify business process improvements, and measure the business results.

Properly-managed enterprise data enables data governance by presenting senior management with a consistent and accurate examination of the organization’s business activity. On the other hand, poorly managed enterprise data can lead to a false sense of security that ultimately causes bad business decisions to be made affecting the stability of the organization. Many organizations are succeeding at using data as an enterprise asset by implementing an enterprise data management (EDM) program.

EDM is a set of disciplines, technologies and best practices to create and sustain a consistent interpretation of business data for all stakeholders throughout the enterprise. EDM provides a semantic layer that is implemented across the enterprise, not just for a single application or IT project. And it provides constant insight into the business information layer across the enterprise describing all types of reference data, structured and unstructured, across the organization.