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]

This Wednesday, June 25, I have the privilege of hosting a Webinar featuring Ash Parikh, Informatica’s Principal Product Marketing Manager and a well-known author and speaker on enterprise data integration issues. Ash will be joined by David J. Ramos, Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics at LinkShare, an Informatica customer that provides online marketing services.

The Webinar, entitled Data Services - Maximizing Business Value Through Right-Time Information, is sponsored by Informatica and will be available live via ebizQ at 12:00 pm Eastern Time.

UPDATE: Archived replays of the Webcast are now available on demand.

Ash Parikh will discuss why many of the current approaches to integration - such as enterprise application integration (EAI), enterprise information integration (EII), and many manual processes still in use – are not giving organizations the agility they need to move to truly real-time, customer-focused enterprises. He will discuss an emerging approach - called data services - that creates a data abstraction layer that opens up all these formerly unreachable data stores across the organization.

David Ramos will explain how LinkShare, which handles 40 GBs of data across 300 million transactions a day, is employing Informatica technology to deliver grid-based data integration and meet the growing real-time data demands of its customers.

This promises to be a very informative and engaging session. Again, the live presentation will take place this Wednesday, June 25, at Noon Eastern Time.

Archived, on demand replay available here.

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]

At a conference last fall, I heard Martin Brodbeck, executive director for strategic architecture at Pfizer, describe how his company, a $48-billion pharmaceutical giant, was able to employ master data management (MDM) to bring together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single, centralized data definition.

The key ingredient to Pfizer's success in this area, Brodbeck said, was not technology by itself, but enterprise governance. Pfizer's MDM effort was led by an internal business sponsor, who helped promote the concept to the rest of the global enterprise. "Master data management is much more about governance than it is about technology," he pointed out. [Read more]

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.
[Read more]

It's time to stop getting bossed around by technology. IT groups too often create their list of projects and priorities based on a logical and mainly technical viewpoint. Their agenda is driven by upgrading hardware and software to take advantage of new capabilities that vendors have built into their products, along with support and maintenance.

A couple of significant trends have occurred since Y2Kand the internet boom:

The first wave was a drive to reduce costs by combining hardware and software platforms and licenses, along with labor reductions. Mission accomplished.

The next wave was recognition by business executives and groups that this BI, CPM and DW stuff could be leveraged to increase revenue, improve responsiveness to customers, develop products faster, etc. A funny thing happened; IT did not get the memo! IT too often still bases their IT budget and plan on technology priorities and sometimes vendor priorities rather than what the business needs.

The madness has got to stop.
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As we discussed in my last post, the four organizational models most often used to implement ICCs are: best practices, technology standards, shared services and centralized services. The best approach is what fits your enterprise best in terms of people, politics and integration maturity.

Below are some pros and cons of each approach.

Best Practices

A word of caution about this approach is that it is often implemented on a virtual team basis. Although it is a very appealing prospect to gain this knowledge without adding more resources, too often enterprises fail to recognize the level of efforts that each contributor needs to make for the common good. If the investment in people is recognized and encouraged – by incorporating as objectives in employee reviews and substituting this work for lower priority work – then this approach can quite effective. If, however, this activity is just thrown on top of everyone’s already overloaded workload, then this model will not be effective.

[Read more]

You have the sponsorship and budget, now how do you set up your Integration Competency Center (ICC)?

There are several approaches to organizing the role and responsibilities of an ICC. The approach you take depends on your enterprise's people, politics and processes. As mentioned in the last post, one approach is a centralized organization or centralized services model. However, that approach does not work in every situation or corporate culture, so don't think you need to make it an ultimate goal.

The four organizational models most often used to implement ICCs are:

• Best practices
• Technology standards
• Shared services
• Centralized services
[Read more]

In the last several posts we discussed how critical data governance programs are to the success of EDW, MDM, CDI and really any enterprise-wide integration initiatives. The corollary to data governance is an Integration Competency Center (ICC). Both involve people, processes, procedures and a lot of politics. Data governance establishes the business processes for data ownership and stewardship for an enterprise. The ICC is what implements these processes from an architecture and technology perspective.

Let’s step back and look at how IT projects, especially those with significant integration components, are generally implemented in companies today.

First, IT systems are most often built on a project-by-project basis. These projects are tactical and stand-alone. Each project starts with a clean slate: selecting integration software; acquiring skilled resources; getting training; establishing processes, procedures and standards; developing the integration application; and finally deploying it. Often, this is the first time that the team is using the integration technology, so a lot of time is spent learning the product, rather than expertly leveraging the integration technology. (That only happens when the team has broad and deep integration knowledge and experience.)
[Read more]