Informatica Enterprise Data Management

To paraphrase the Paul Simon song, there must be 50 ways to integrate your enterprise data. In recent years, companies have made all kinds of attempts to integrate both their applications and data - employing techniques from sophisticated enterprise application integration projects all the way down to manual hand coding. However, while most of these approaches work at least some of the time, few, if any, are delivering real agility for their businesses.

Recently, I had the opportunity to moderate a Webcast - sponsored by Informatica and hosted by ebizQ - which explored in detail an emerging approach, called data services, which ties into service oriented architecture (SOA) and creates a data abstraction layer that addresses the complexities seen across enterprise data environments.

Leading the Webcast were Ash Parikh, principal product marketing manager for Informatica and a highly regarded industry speaker and author, and David Ramos, director of business intelligence and analytics for LinkShare Corporation.

In his presentation, Ash urged closer collaboration between the enterprise data management and emerging service oriented architecture (SOA) worlds. (John Schmidt recently provided a nice overview of SOA here at the EDM blogsite.)

Ash observed that current approaches to enterprise data management have worked well from an application point of view, but have been ineffective for enterprise data. [Read more]

Are BI managers and professionals sometimes too eager to please the business? Are centralized BI efforts slowing down progress? Should BI teams address requirements before the business even asks for them? These questions may seem counter-intuitive, but Wayne Eckerson, director of research for TDWI, says that the best intentions for BI efforts in many organizations may actually result in sluggish projects, duplication of effort, and misaligned priorities between BI teams and the business. [Read more]

Any budget crunches that hit organizations this year may not directly affect enterprise data management initiatives, but EDM and associated middleware will be called upon to help businesses through turbulent times. [Read more]

I’ll admit it, as an older brother, I didn’t want my younger sister borrowing or bugging me for my prized possessions. I still hoard things at work, old computer equipment, mice, cables, all in the name of finding a use for them at some point. I just like to know they are there when you need them as you can see here.

Is data treated the same way within corporations? Do application owners like sharing their data with others? In my experience, no, they don’t. Ask any mainframe or ERP program manager about utilizing their production data for other purposes and I’m sure you’ll receive a litany of questions around impact to production systems, utilization costs, and complexity of access. And IT’s business request list for access to these precious resources is only growing. For many organizations, data access is a cultural problem.
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I’m already making my flight arrangements for the 10th Annual Informatica World Conference in Las Vegas this year. [Read more]

Tom Davenport has a great post “IT’s Wonderful Life” in his interesting “The Next Big Thing” blog. With the backdrop of the holiday season and the sentimental movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart, he muses in his post about the positive things IT has contributed to companies. He cites Wal-Mart (WMT), various airlines and the banking industry as all having benefited from IT’s efforts.

I’d like to take his praise a step further by observing that all his examples are great references for the business benefit of enterprise data warehousing and enterprise data management.

All of these companies have positioned data as an enterprise asset that, when integrated and transformed, enables them to manage far better than if they were simply operating by “gut feel.”
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Since launching the EDM blog in early 2007, we have focused on a wide variety of data management, Informatica usage and technology topics. In 2008, I will also be discussing my experiences and research in Enterprise Data Warehousing, an area that our customers have used our software and solutions to great success.

Enterprise Data Warehousing is a term that has been around for a long time. In the mid-90’s, Bill Inmon preached an enterprise approach to data warehousing that was based on a central repository of corporate data. With the technology at the time, success was only attainable by a few elite organizations at extreme levels of funding. Informatica pioneered an incremental data mart approach that led to years of prosperity in the Data Warehousing market for Informatica and customers using our technology for their data warehousing related projects.
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Happy New Year! I look forward to discussing a myriad of Enterprise Data Management topics with you this year. My work with customers never stops and I’ve made a 2008 resolution to share as much of their success as possible. I’ll start with one of the oldest but least addressed problems in Data Integration.

Have you ever asked yourself or been asked, “Where did that number come from?” or, if you’re in IT, have you been confronted by your business colleagues with “Those numbers don’t make sense!” I find these to be very common questions that consume hours and days of business and IT analyst time. Think about it, at the grass roots level of every company or organization, the amount of time spent deciphering numbers from reports is staggering.

This challenge starts from the very beginning of intelligence gathering, underlying data from operational systems. It’s why the first step in any data integration project (DW, Migration, MDM, Consolidation, etc…) is to understand and map out the nature and location of the data appropriate for the business problem at hand. An estimated 70 percent of the time spent on any corporate application development is dedicated to finding, identifying, reconciling, and verifying data, and then determining the consequences of modifying the data. This is what makes traditional integration projects so time- and resource-intensive—and what makes metadata so useful in exercising internal control or streamlining a myriad of related activities. The recent Informatica Release 8.5 launch highlighted “data lineage” for helping IT resolve questions for the business as well as providing “self service” for answering data-related questions for analysts and developers.
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The recent Informatica Release 8.5 launch highlighted Real-time Integration Competency Centers (ICCs) as the optimal model for successful data integration. I’d like to review the concept of the Real-time ICC and why Release 8.5 supports this advanced operational, organizational and technology model.

As data integration moves beyond the realm of data warehousing into operational integration, real-time and data services use cases have exploded in importance to the business and necessitated stronger, unified infrastructure for IT to meet the challenge. Philip Russom, Senior Manager, TDWI Research captures this trend specifically in his quote on Release 8.5.

"The movement toward real-time data access and delivery has been the most influential trend in data integration this decade. The trend has enabled user organizations to initiate a variety of valuable real-time practices, including operational BI, real-time data warehousing, on-demand computing, performance monitoring, just-in-time inventory, and so on. And the trend has led vendors to extend their data integration products, so that many functions operate in real-time, not just batch. Informatica 8.5 is a great example of this trend, because it’s re-architected to support more real-time and on-demand functions for data integration, changed data capture, and data quality." [Read more]

Take a step back for a minute and ask yourself if your organization is ready for enterprise data warehousing (EDW). Or, if you're already doing it, how is it going – I mean, how is it really going? And no matter how successful you’ve been, what can you do next for your business?

Many of us are in the budgeting phase, planning how to spend our budgets for 2008. Traditionally, we make our personal New Year's resolutions in December, looking back over the previous year to see what we want to improve. But in business the best time for that retrospection is NOW so that you have time to influence what you do next year. Part of that retrospection should be assessing your readiness for EDW.

EDW is a process. It is not as simple as switching on a light switch and you suddenly have EDW capability and benefits.
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