Informatica Data Services

This blog post is part of an ongoing series highlighting the importance of EIM and how a properly strategized and architected EIM initiative can remove the cost, complexity and risk associated with enterprise integration infrastructures.

Thus, in my opinion, in order to effectively enable business agility, businesses need access to information at the speed of business, or what is called “right-time” information. “Right-time” information, as we have discussed, is information that is made available to the business at exactly the speed or latency that it is required, be it batch, near real-time or real-time. When businesses have access to holistic and accurate information exactly when it is needed, it becomes extremely easy to respond quickly to changing compliance laws, roll-out new and differentiated functionality, improve the overall customer service experience, rapidly and effectively support mergers and acquisitions, and hence enable true business agility.

It has been a busy 2 months for me as I have been trying to catch-up on all the post-Informatica World activity, as you can follow in the "Informatica World Blog." As promised in my earlier post in this series, I want to round-off this discussion around Getting EIM Right, with a summary of how I define "right-time" information. I would like to hear from you to see if you see it in the same or different light. As I see it, it is extremely important that accurate and consistent information is available at exactly the time it is needed in order to respond effectively to the needs of the business, supporting timely decision making.

If we look around, it’s a new world driven by powerful macroeconomic conditions such as globalization, growth, governance and risk mitigation. With growing challenges in achieving agility and flexibility under these conditions, businesses are starting to see increasing demand to support sophisticated operational scenarios such as consolidation of customer data in real-time to support a call center, or delivery of timely and precise forecasts for supply chain operation optimizations, etc. People and businesses seem to want to access their information much faster than ever before. Also, in speaking to a number of CIOs, IT executives and IT managers, enterprise IT organizations are increasingly trying to use their enterprise data within their analytic domains for more mission-critical applications.

As we can see around us, enterprise data is constantly being accessed, manipulated, and used by more users, through more applications, in increasingly shorter time spans. I can see this trend being reinforced as businesses increasingly adopt industry standards like SWIFT in the financial services industry, ACORD in insurance and HL7 in healthcare, to exchange information with their partners. While in some use cases it could be sufficient, effective and possibly the requirement to get information using a batch data movement mode, in other more real-time, 24×7 or mission-critical operations, live or current information may be needed to maximize operational efficiency.

Here is a graph that I like a lot and that I use frequently to explain this point, as it succinctly depicts all these factors in what I call the enterprise information latency continuum. This graph showcases both the increase in demand for more current or live information as well as a blend of analytical and operational data for enabling businesses to better respond to macroeconomic conditions all around us.

Click to Enlarge

What do you think?