Customer demands are changing radically in the investment sector. Market volatility has played havoc with long term pension scheme planning. Liability Driven Investment (LDI) and other investment planning approaches are emerging that increase the pressure on Fund Managers to develop effective new products and investment strategies. Regulation is also on the increase as investors and governments are demanding much greater transparency and openness in investment practices.

Risk has to be managed more closely which means that information on Issuers, Guarantors, Counterparties and other risk carrying entities has to be managed effectively and integrated with existing systems. Together with the natural growth in competition, these factors place huge pressures on Fund Management companies to make radical changes.

Data is fundamental to any investment enterprise. Effective, economic management of data underpins existing operations and enables the transformations that will be required to satisfy changing customer demands, competition and regulatory pressures. So Data warehouse(s) and other aspects of the overall data architecture become much more critical to the enterprise. The question is what process must the organisation adopt in order to identify, plan and implement all the necessary business and system changes.

The Enterprise Data Management (EDM) plan is the starting point to making effective change throughout the enterprise. It states the destination and describes how you will get there. It defines benefits and costs. It outlines potential risks and provides guidance for handling them. It gives a set of measures that can be used along the way to judge progress and adjust the journey according to changing circumstances.

Knowledge is essential for effective planning. Knowledge of the enterprise and its relationship with the wider investment sector is crucial. Knowledge of architectural concepts is important to the development of a realistic plan.
Enterprise Data Planning is based on proven business planning disciplines. Key architectural layers for data and applications are then added in order to provide an enterprise wide understanding of the uses and interdependencies of data. This enables the definition of the core components of the EDM plan:

- Industry structure and business objectives
- Assessment of systems and services
- Target architecture for applications, data and infrastructure
- Target organization structures
- Systems, database, infrastructure and organizational plans
- Business case, costs, benefits, results and risks.

The Open Systems Group have evolved the TOGAF enterprise systems planning process for this purpose. It acts as an extension to good business planning methods to provide a framework for the development of the systems and data architectural components that are essential to the development of a realistic program for enterprise wide change for a fund management company.