The Outsourcing Option

Although data outsourcing is gaining momentum in certain areas, many firms are not fully embracing the concept. Carla Mangado reports on the risks and challenges, questioning if larger parts of enterprise data management programs could be outsourced in coming years.

Professionals agree outsourcing enterprise data management (EDM) processes can provide benefits to their businesses. Yet they are well aware of the possible challenges they face when relying on this procedure. While many believe the benefits outweigh the risks, in some fields of the data world, outsourcing is just not that popular. This is the case with reference data.

Even if outsourcing may seem to be inevitable when a firm decides to refresh a data infrastructure, many firms have not yet realized the positive impact it can have on the business. Brian Sentance, chief executive at data management system provider Xenomorph, says few clients go down the outsourcing road. And Paris-based Steve Scemama , capital markets industry global head of trading system services at Accenture, says the role of outsourcing in EDM is "still very limited to specific processes, very categorized by the type of data, very segmented depending on client type."

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