Informatica Data Services

This blog post is part of an ongoing series highlighting the importance of Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and how a properly strategized and architected EIM initiative can remove the cost, complexity and risk associated with enterprise integration infrastructures, I look forward to hearing your thoughts and input on the subject.

In the last post, I mentioned some of the typical modern day business concerns that were expressed to me by a number of customers and prospects. As I dug deeper and tried to understand how these enterprises were dealing with these concerns, it became obvious to me that in order to effectively deal with the business challenges, the underlying IT infrastructure needs to provide a single, comprehensive view into all business critical information assets. Also, the IT infrastructure needs to seamlessly handle the complexity of all enterprise data—its varying volume, its varying latencies, its many formats and structures.

So, does this mean that there are no existing solutions that can efficiently deal with the all the complexity of enterprise data? The simple answer is no! Existing technologies such as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) have fallen short of dealing with all the complexities of enterprise data. Either they have spent their time addressing only the application integration hairball and forgotten that a similar situation exists in the data layer, or they are the wrong or inefficient tool for the right problem. The problem consists of dealing with the complexity of enterprise data, its varied latencies, volumes, formats and structures.

As we can see in the figure, addressing and dealing only with application level integration issues highlights the complexity that exists at the data layer:

Click to Enlarge

Figure – The Data Integration Hairball

So how does an IT organization go about getting EIM right? How can an enterprise integration infrastructure seamlessly deal with what I call the data integration hairball, while continuing to reuse existing assets?

Specifically, in speaking to a number of IT managers and architects, many technical concerns abound around making information available at the right-time, in order to provide the business with an advantage. IT organizations are constantly looking to become more responsive to all the continuously changing needs of the business team, such as:

• How do we seamlessly deal with rapidly integrating new data sources?

• What about all the various data access mechanisms that are out there?

• Can we deliver the data in the form it is needed?

• How do we ensure the delivery of data when the business needs it?

• How do we find out who owns this data?

• How do we know that this is exactly the data that we want to use?

• How do we proactively correct inaccuracies or inconsistencies across all our data sources? Is data accuracy and consistency something that we already have or are assuming currently?

• Why do we need to know the structure of all data across various data sources?

• Is there an easy way to do change management on all the data? Is there a way to understand the impact of change easily?

• What data do we have about, say, “Customer?”

• How do we pull together all the disparate data on “Customer” that we need?

• How do we know what else “Customer” is related to?

From what I have gathered from my numerous discussions with various stakeholders in enterprise IT organizations, there is a defined need for a scalable and flexible data integration technology that can complement existing IT infrastructure and make holistic and accurate information available at the speed of business. Such a technology will provide the foundation for an EIM strategy that can ensure business agility by enabling IT organizations to better manage the creation, management, manipulation, and delivery of enterprise data in a scalable, flexible, consistent, accurate, secure and timely manner.

Can you think of any other technical concerns that I may have missed?

Next up “Getting EIM Right Part II: What is “Right-Time” Information?”