Informatica Enterprise Data Management

We all know how mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley place a burden on many businesses, by requiring that they be able to document the reliability and quality of data. Most major mandates, which have now been in place for several years, have given rise to a whole industry dedicated to reporting. In many companies, the equivalents of small departments have been kept busy 52 weeks a year doing little more than generating reports and reviewing data to meet compliance requirements.

Obviously, things can't go on like this. Rather than spending money to just keep simply meeting requirements, many companies are seeking to better integrate compliance into their day-to-day operations in a more automated, systematic form. In doing so, they seek to go far beyond meeting the letter of the law, to take the opportunity to improve and streamline their own processes - which will pay off in battling the challenges of an increasingly competitive marketplace.

By eliminating the silos that have separated data across the enterprise, as well as the silos that have pigeonholed the compliance efforts intended to gather and report this information, organizations can make impressive strides in moving forward with greater agility. In the process, automation can reduce the burden of paperwork and manual processes that drive up the costs of compliance.

Such "sustainable" compliance management can be built on top of three disciplines that already exist within most businesses today. These include governance, or the oversight of corporate activities and processes; risk management, or the identification, assessment and monitoring of risks and controls; and compliance management.  This integrated approach - known as Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management, or GRC, takes its three namesake disciplines and takes a more holistic approach to increasing information visibility and management. [Read more]

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]

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]

We’ve been discussing the three pillars of an ICC, organization, process and technology, for a while now. In this segment, I’ll focus on a range of technology requirements facing ICC implementations teams, whether they are starting from scratch or morphing a set of disparate solutions into a common infrastructure. It goes without saying, to meet the demand of a broader set of enterprise needs rather than those of a single line of business, the infrastructure powering an ICC needs to evolve and mature.

High Availability
One of the first aspects related to infrastructure is the need for high availability. This pertains to the overall integration infrastructure environment. “Shared Infrastructure” by its very nature increases the need for reliability. An outage of a single point solution is acceptable and explainable but when several organizations are relying on solutions delivered by an ICC, outages can significantly impact revenue and productivity.

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I’ve been writing on ICC’s (Integration Competency Centers) in previous posts but thought some additional information on the models I’ve seen implemented within various organizations is in order.

Most organizations start down the ICC path do so to address the “project silo” problem, where a divisional or project team may be struggling to meet deadlines or success metrics while another team is clicking along delivering value to the business. These teams may or may not be sharing similar technology and approach but the glaring need to improve is recognized and the business case straight forward, especially if organizational boundaries aren’t in the way of change.

What options are available? [Read more]