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]

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]

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]

There’s no question that integrating analytical and transaction data to deliver “Pervasive Business Intelligence” can be a significant project for many enterprises. However, the good news is that it’s a capability that’s within the reach of many enterprises today. That’s the gist of a Q&A with three industry thought leaders, published in the latest edition of Intelligent Enterprise. [Read more]

I’m already making my flight arrangements for the 10th Annual Informatica World Conference in Las Vegas this year. [Read more]

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.
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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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