Informatica Perspectives

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.
Tying together the various sources and types of metadata and doing so in an intelligible manner for various audiences is a difficult problem to solve technically and culturally. But Release 8.5 goes a ways toward providing an environment to help solve these problems. And the effort to put the solution in place has been dramatically reduceds due to improvements in performance and reductions in complexity.

If you have experiences or challenges in this area, please bring them to my attention, they’ll help me keep that New Year’s resolution!