Informatica Enterprise Data Management

There are two things I hate in discussions about real-time business intelligence.

First, pundits cite great examples of the business need for real-time BI, but then go overboard by assuming that every report and analysis needs to be done using real-time data.

The reality is most analysis is done looking at specific timeframes (daily, weekly or monthly), trending (YTD) or period over period analysis. Up-to-the minute data would be discarded or create “noise” in analysis. The cost both to load and then to filter out the irrelevant real-time data for analysis is much greater than most enterprises are willing or able to spend. And it just makes things too complex.

The second area that riles me is that people, even high powered architects who should know better, oversimplify real-time BI. As I mentioned when I discussed SOA, too often real-time BI is seen as solely accessing data rather than involving more complex data integration. Other than accessing very limited data such as data related to an individual customer, much reporting and analysis involves gathering and transforming data from many locations. This requires data integration rather than just data access.
Too many times enterprises do something because it's technically possible rather than because the business needs it. Technology implemented in the absence of business value is NOT a project you want to deliver in 2008.

So what should you deliver in 2008 in relation to real-time BI? The two key ingredients to success:

1. Design your architecture to match real-time data with who needs it rather than burdening everyone with real-time data. Most of them don't need it.

2. Incorporate real-time data integration to support your real-time BI processes.

Note: data integration is not just a batch, ETL function. You can implement data integration with ETL, EAI, EII or via SOA. Real-time BI needs data integration so you should use your data integration suite to implement what your BI and business users’ needs are regardless of whether they need yesterday’s data or what happened a few seconds ago.