The restaurant chain IHOP perfectly illustrates the 'on the ground' financial potential of the enterprise data hub model. IHOP's corporate headquarters realized that the organization lacked a view into its franchises and wanted better visibility into the day-to-day operations of each of its locations. Unfortunately, each franchise maintained its own data such as legal, finance, operations, marketing, and so on. Each franchise also had its own resources devoted to managing that data. As a result, poor business decisions were being made and operational errors were occurring too frequently. In short, executives and managers could not vouch for the very data they were relying on to make key business decisions.
IHOP has begun to deploy its version of a data hub — a franchise data hub to collect all the different 'silos' of information. In doing so, the company not only eliminated the need for multiple data managers, but also ensured that every department...