Informatica Enterprise Data Management

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]

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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No longer do companies keep increasing tech spending “like it’s 1999.” Companies have become more selective in what they invest in. The key word is “investment.” Most companies don’t just go out and buy the latest and shiniest technology, no matter how much hype there is, unless there is a solid business ROI (return on investment.) No discretionary project gets funding without the ROI.

I am an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Business Technology blog written Ben Worthen. In his post “Oracle and Accenture: Not a Rising Tide”, December 20, 2007, he postulates that although Oracle and Accenture just had terrific quarters and are forecasting good times in 2008, tech spending will be flat and other tech vendors will not experience the same solid growth as these two companies. Unlike in 1999, there will not be a rising tide for all tech companies. I couldn’t agree more.

I don’t know (nor does anyone else, really) whether tech spending will be flat or will grow. (It could grow because we will avoid a recession or because people’s estimates are too conservative, as they have been the last few years.)
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I am seeing a disconnect between many clients' 2008 plans for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the expectations they are setting with the business groups that are funding them.

The good news is that people have been pervasive in getting sponsorship and funding for SOA projects based on anticipated business benefits. The bad news is that despite good technology, many IT projects fail when business group don't get what they think they were promised. It’s like the old saying “you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?”

The promise of SOA is to establish reusable services that can be deployed throughout the enterprise to deliver accelerated application implementation at lower risk and effort. Reusable business services reduce redundant or overlapping development efforts and increase IT productivity. They also enable applications that were previously siloed to exchange data and interoperate.
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Do you have projects lined up for next year that will deal with reference data? It's a good idea, especially if you want to better understand your customers, determine the profitability of your products or work more effectively with your suppliers.

If your projects are formal they may be identified as master data management (MDM), customer data integration (CDI) or product information management (PIM). All of these are examples of reference data.

Getting your reference data in order – reflecting what is and was – helps to establish data consistently. This, in turn, enables historical analysis such as trending, and helps you plan for the future. Some of you will not have projects with the MDM, CDI or PIM labels, but if you look beneath the covers you almost inevitably will see efforts to improve your reference situation.

The reasons the MDM, CDI and PIM acronyms have emerged in our industry is because most businesses have not done a great job with reference data yet and because it is difficult. But, as with many things in life, if it was easy it probably wouldn’t be worth doing.

Don’t let a vendor convince you that all you need is their shiny new MDM, CDI or PIM product. Software alone won’t solve the problem; otherwise it would have been solved a long time ago.
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One of the dirtiest unspoken secrets in business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) is that most business people, despite the sizable investment in BI, PM and data warehousing, are not getting the information they need to make decisions. (See this Accenture study.)

And the reason for that, yet another unspoken truth, is that most business people are performing their analysis via data shadow systems or spreadmarts.

A quick recap: a data shadow system is an application built by the business. It gathers data from many sources, and business people often augment that data manually, using Microsoft Office for reporting and analysis. Ask business people how they really get their information and their answer is almost sure to include a data shadow system.

Too often the “problem” of data shadow systems is that people are using Microsoft Excel as the front-end BI tool. That is really not the problem. The real problem causing inconsistent and error-prone data is that people are using both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to perform ETL! A typical data shadow system has:

• between six to three dozen steps (and I have seen systems with hundreds!) of Microsoft Office (Microsoft Access and/or Microsoft Excel) queries or imports gathering data,
• a series of steps to “integrate” the data, and finally,
• a number of worksheets to create the reports.

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Your 2008 strategy and budget are probably all set. Now it is just a matter of tactics to implement your business and IT objectives for next year. Have you examined the top business initiatives and IT projects in the context of integration?

Unfortunately, companies historically design and deploy business initiatives and their supporting IT projects in business and application silos. They justify these projects with a solid business return on investment (ROI) based on very high expectations of what the business will get. The expectation may involve great looking dashboards, terrific visualization, real-time access and widely distributed reports.

But many of these projects will fall into what Gartner Research describes as the “trough of disillusionment.” Too many times these projects will be labeled failures, not because the technology was not terrific, but because the data was not correct or consistent. A beautiful visual display or enabling pervasive data access is only of value to the business if that data is right. It’s all about the data. And that’s all about the integration.
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I teach data warehousing and business intelligence courses at Northeastern University's Graduate School of Engineering. It provides me a fresh perspective on what we are doing in the industry. This is because unlike when I am talking with customers, analysts and vendors, my graduate students are always asking "WHY."

They ask because they do not have our industry experience or background. Yes, I do need to take the time to explain a lot of things that I otherwise would not have to, but that is actually good news. The graduate students also have not been locked into a particular way of doing things because they see everything as a new experience. They have open minds.

It would be a good idea for anyone planning projects for next year to have an open mind, too.
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Now that you're back "mentally" from the summer it’s time to focus on your fall activities to prepare you for the Q4 push. But before you get to the Q4 fire drills there is one big task ahead of you – planning for next year and getting your budget approved.

We talked last time about connecting your data projects with business initiatives and I’d like to review the process in relation to getting your budget submission completed and approved.

It’s really a simple process, of course with a lot of politics thrown in. (Sorry, but you'll have to handle those yourself!) To play the game you have got to understand what the business is planning both strategically and tactically, as well as what programs or projects are being planned and funded to those objectives. You’ve got to have a queue of projects that you feel need to get done along with others that you keep hoping there will be time and resources for someday. The time is now.
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When we discuss Enterprise Data Management (EDM) we’re almost always talking about how it applies to finance. It’s no wonder. Finance is where EDM has made the biggest inroads and the biggest impact so far. With governmental regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and intense pressure from stakeholders, such as investors, the CFO has to seriously look at effectively managing data. EDM has enabled organizations large and small to give up their data shadow system habit and get on the “single version of the truth” bandwagon.

A long-term benefit for companies implementing EDM would be the establishment of an end-to-end data integration framework as a shared service model. Developed once, and reused throughout your enterprise to satisfy the data needs of business units around the globe, this data- integration service transforms cost fundamentals for IT investments, as well as accelerates deployment once in place. It becomes the data-integration “plug and play” that enables business people to tap into their data when needed. [Read more]