Informatica Enterprise Data Management

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]

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

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 ROI from a company’s investment in Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is measured with fairly precise metrics, such as dollars and time savings, faster time-to-market, and increasing sales through more directed marketing (up-sell, cross-sell, better demographic targeting, etc.).

However, there are also benefits that are harder to quantify that may be even more significant, such as governmental and regulatory compliance, financial transparency, improved data consistency and integrity, faster data availability and utilizing performance management to run the business. Even these benefits are not touchy-feely and you need to quantify the impact they will have to your business.

Okay, the potential for significant ROI from your EDM should be a no-brainer but… A few years ago I came across a survey from Cutter Consortium that found that only 15% of firms surveyed considered their data warehousing efforts to date a major (my emphasis) success. What would the other 85% say their ROI is? They are probably embarrassed to say. [Read more]

Do you know where your financial data was last night? Sure, you know the operational and financial systems that it was in, but who else played with it before it got into your financial reports? What undocumented IT processes (horrors!) extracted data, manipulated it and then input into another system? And how many spreadsheets did the data get imported into, changed and then passed along to another spreadsheet?

It would be humorous if this was just happening to your competitors’ data. But it’s happening to yours. And it’s keeping your CFO up at night.

In my last post I introduced the concept of enterprise data management (EDM). I hope you were paying attention, because this is where a concept like EDM, where the business takes ownership of the data in cooperation with the IT group, starts to really pay off. You see, it’s only with an enterprise approach using EDM that you can really gain management effectiveness, corporate governance, and organizational alignment that impact the value of an enterprise. [Read more]

Consistent, correct data. That doesn’t sound too complicated, does it? But actually, one of the most daunting challenges facing CFOs and their staffs today is how to ensure that the financial information they supply to stakeholders, both externally and internally, is consistent and correct.

The checklist for compliance seems to grow whenever you turn around. Sarbanes-Oxley, US Patriots Act, HIPAA. MiFID, Basel II, PCI data security standards, etc. – were these even part of our vocabulary several years ago?

Even when we have achieved statutory compliance, can we really audit our data from the point of origin to consumption? Why do we rely on so much manual reconciliation to audit and trace the data flows across systems each month, whether for cash flow forecasting or revenue recognition validation? Wasn’t each one of these financial systems supposed to get us the “single version of the truth?” [Read more]