Monthly Archives: October 2011
Some Ideas for Standardizing Unique Identifiers
Clearly, as I have been noodling about in my last set of posts, “naming” and identifiers can seem benign but in a world where data reuse and sharing is becoming the norm, identifier proliferation can lead to some serious effort needed for management. In fact, you might suggest that in order to reduce the impact of data quality issues on managing identity, some specific data governance techniques could bring some order to the chaos. (more…)
Future Integration Needs: Embracing Complex Data
Hear from Informatica’s Karen Hsu on a new study’s findings and implications of big complex data.
For more on this see: Future Integration Needs: Embracing Complex Data
Coping With The Data Deluge
UK banks and financial regulatory bodies are currently being flooded with customer complaints about Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) and struggling to cope with the data deluge. The Telegraph recently reported on how complaints around mis-sold payment protection insurance are pouring in to the Financial Ombudsman Service at a phenomenal rate of more than 800 day, creating an enormous data backlog.
With the final bill for PPI expected to top £8billion, banks are scrambling to increase the number of employees dedicated to claims and ramp up their IT systems. It is likely that some banks are now looking to sign outsourcing contracts, but there is uncertainty around this as the mis-selling of PPI is hugely complicated. (more…)
Social Media Monitoring for Early Warning of Public Safety Issues
A friend posted a humorous photo on Facebook the other day of a sign that read “In Case of 
Fire… Exit building before Tweeting about it.” Hopefully it’s a made-up sign just to get a laugh, but the truth is actually closer than you think. The intersection of the pervasiveness of mobile devices and the ubiquitous nature of social media is creating a tremendous amount of relevant data about the physical world not previously seen before – what is happening, where it’s happening, to whom, by whom in some cases and when. Not usually early adopters, public safety officials are starting to take notice.
Here’s a real-world story: (more…)
Addressing the Big Data Backup Challenge with Database Archiving
In a recent InformationWeek blog, “Big Data A Big Backup Challenge”, George Crump aptly pointed out the problems of backing up big data and outlined some best practices that should be applied to address them, including:
- Identifying which data can be re-derived and therefore doesn’t need to be backed up
- Eliminating redundancy, file de-duplication, and applying data compression
- Using storage tiering and the combination of online disk and tapes to reduce storage cost and optimize performance (more…)
Whose Fault Is The Integration Hairball?
The integration hairball is a pattern that is repeated over and over again in virtually every organization. The hairball is characterized by an overly complex collection of dependencies between application components that is hard to change, expensive to maintain, and unpredictable in operation.
I have used the graphic below since 2001 to present a visual image of the hairball. It shows a collection of enterprise applications as boxes with lines representing the information exchanges between them. I use this picture as an example of an anti-pattern whenever I present to audiences of IT professionals about Lean Integration or ICCs. As soon as the image flashes up on the screen, the first reaction I get – anywhere around the world – is “how did you get a picture of our environment”. (more…)
Smart Identifiers Are Not So Smart, and Chasing Identifiers is a Challenge
In the last few posts, I discussed some of the issues that emerge when trying to manage unique identifiers, and I suggested that there might be some other ideas for managing unique identity. One idea that has floated around for many years is the smart identifier.
The basic idea of a smart identifier is a method of unique identification that carries information within the actual value. An example might be a product identifier that is composed of three values: the location code for the factory in which it is being produced, the item’s category number taken from the hierarchy listed in the UNSPC (United Nations Standard Product and Services Code), and version number based on product redesign. Since the identifier itself carries identifying information, it should be a good way to uniquely differentiate between two items, right? (more…)
Know Thy Customer
There has been much discussion, particularly in the UK, about banks restricting the use of their investment and retail arms. The thinking process behind this is that investment banking is much riskier and so by drawing a clear line between the two, consumers will be better protected if another financial crisis should hit. (more…)
Hadoop Tuesday Update: Hadoop Paves the Way to Data Services
For too long, many enterprises have been attempting to sort through increasingly complex spaghetti architectures with point-to-point data integration. “They get to the point where when they want to introduce a new product or make a change, they have to touch 30 different systems,” says John Akred, data and platforms lead at Accenture Technology Labs. “That has real consequences in the marketplace for enterprises.”
John continued that Hadoop – an open-source software framework that enables applications to run across large arrays of nodes, accessing petabytes’ worth of data – will help organizations manage and scale up to the huge volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data now surging into organizations. I recently had the opportunity to join John, along with Julianna DeLua, Enterprise Solution Evangelist for Big Data from Informatica, for a discussion of Hadoop’s role in the emerging data as a platform paradigm. The session was the second session of the Hadoop Tuesdays Webinar series, sponsored by Informatica and Cloudera. (more…)
MDM and ACORD Standards: Synergies and Considerations
Hear from Informatic’s Karen Hsu on the new ACORD certified Information Management solution that helps insurance organizations drive customer-centricity.
For more on this see: Master Data Management and ACORD Standards: Synergies and Considerations
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