One of the dirty little secrets of IT is that most data management systems today are a costly mess.

In a Dollars from Data: How to Turn Enterprise Information into Business Information webinar sponsored by IBM, the problem with IT in a business context is that as the number of systems proliferate in the enterprise, the less control IT has over the meta data that is needed to effectively integrate systems.

Gary O’Connell, senior marketing manager for IBM’s infrastructure solutions for data warehousing, does a good job of explaining why meta data is critical in corporate IT environments. Without it, business processes quickly become a time, consuming, manual mess prone to errors and lots of duplication. Naturally, that also means these processes can’t be easily audited.

From there, this webinar devolves into a pitch for consolidating enterprise software infrastructure around IBM’s Infosphere software and the models that IBM has created for managing data in five specific industries.

Despite the product pitch, this webinar does a really good job of highlighting major issues that speak to the real value of IT in the enterprise today that every business-minded IT executive should be working to solve today.

Rating: Provides a good framework for thinking about the next generation of data management in the enterprise.