Ok we've seen these blogs all over the place now. We know we're in a recession. We know we want to do more with less in our IT budgets. Tell us something we don't already know. But this is taking it just way too far. Now I'm starting see something a bit more outragious. How IT technologies can prevent meltdowns from starting in the first place. Is it possible? Is it even relevant? I'll let you decide:
Todd Goldman (No relation to Goldman-Sachs) writes in his blog:
One of the reasons for the meltdown is that the banks don't have the ability to price these mortgage backed securities because they lack traceability back to the source. They can't tell you what mortgages map to a particular financial product and as a result, no one can say if a certain set of securities is better or worse than another set. Now this particular problem is all about data management. The ability to accurately show the lineage that links the underlying asset to a complex financial instrument based on that asset is not a skill that most banks have. As a result, this only inflames the lack of confidence that has been injected into the market due to the housing bubble bursting, people not being able to pay their variable rate mortgages or refinance those mortgages at a lower rate. So while all of those non-data effects cause concern, lack of good data management to price out the true cost of those effects only pours gasoline on an already raging fire.
My two cents... or make that 750 qua-trillion cents... Definitely definitely consider Data Management for your enterprise architecture, your SOA, your Business Intelligence applications, your data warehouse, your composite applications even... but... Hmmm... I think I need a physics PHD to understand how credit default swaps work.
If you think that Data Management can help for helping with the mortgage crisis, contact the Treasury Department today. But for now, I'm going to use it for preventing Enterprise IT meltdowns on main street.
