Looking to get your master data mess under control? Well, IT research giant Gartner Inc. has come up with a seven-layer framework that starts with vision and ends with metrics for getting the job done.

The framework enables organizations to start building an enterprise information management (EIM) framework that jibes with their enterprise application architecture. EIM's objective, in Gartner's words, is "to address the decades of silo-based system development, in which each application maintained its own version of data and processes rules to suit local performance needs." EIM resolves semantic inconsistencies and master data management issues, which according to a Gartner research brief, have added "significant cost and complexity to application integration and cross-functional success."

Without an EIM strategy, Gartner believes, a company's SOA aspirations will be severely undercut. In fact, organizations that create an EIM framework will increase their chances of SOA success by 70%, the researcher contends. "[It's] one of those things that really should have been talked about before SOA," notes Gartner vice president Andrew White in an interview with Managing Automation. Organizations, he adds, need to make EIM a central part of their IT architectures and strategies. "If not, their SOA [plans] will come to a grinding halt."

While technologies and processes for cleansing data (i.e., eliminating redundancies, semantic inconsistencies, et al.) and enabling application integration have, for better or worse, been around for decades, there's no better time than now to get started with an EIM plan, White suggests. "Clean as you go," he recommends. "If you never start, you end up going backwards."

Manufacturers, White says, are no worse off in this regard than their industry counterparts in retail, financial services, or elsewhere. In fact, because of their dependence on vendor-built ERP packages, manufacturers have fewer silos to contend with. "We see visionaries ahead of the curve in manufacturing," White claims. "The Shells, BPs and Unilevers of the world are pretty sophisticated -- manufacturing gets a bad rap."

So, while you start the data cleansing process, here are some tips from Gartner on how to build an EIM framework:

• Think deep thoughts: You'll need a formal vision that goes beyond the idiosyncratic needs of your business. Themes should include maximizing shareholder value (for public companies); achieving operational efficiency; sustaining growth and innovation; and enabling enterprise agility, the Gartner report states. All require accurate, consistently timely and secure, and transparent data "that flows seamlessly and continuously inside and outside the organization," the report notes.
  
  

• Get strategic: An EIM framework should enable the vision to become reality. This starts with a top-down commitment to information management that includes budgets, projects, personnel, and governance processes. While many organizations have information management strategies that focus on structured data, today's EIM plan needs to bring unstructured data -- in the form of e-mail and rich content types -- into the fold, the Gartner report points out. "The broader scope enables organizations to address content convergence issues ("infoglut"), especially in support of compliance or corporate performance management issues," the report states.
  
  

• Policies are key: You'll need to develop a governance plan that includes the development, maintenance, communication, and enforcement of information management policies and procedures that support an enterprise information architecture, such as data sharing, quality, and stewardship. A more disciplined approach will impact traditional systems development processes, the report points out, but will result in policies that support better administrative controls, accountability, and security that enable cleaner and more consistent data, business process and technology standards, and greater reuse of code, Gartner believes.