Informatica Perspectives

I’ll admit it, as an older brother, I didn’t want my younger sister borrowing or bugging me for my prized possessions. I still hoard things at work, old computer equipment, mice, cables, all in the name of finding a use for them at some point. I just like to know they are there when you need them as you can see here.

Is data treated the same way within corporations? Do application owners like sharing their data with others? In my experience, no, they don’t. Ask any mainframe or ERP program manager about utilizing their production data for other purposes and I’m sure you’ll receive a litany of questions around impact to production systems, utilization costs, and complexity of access. And IT’s business request list for access to these precious resources is only growing. For many organizations, data access is a cultural problem.
On the other hand, the way corporate IT environments have evolved over the decades, data access is a tremendous technical challenge. With a variety of applications and architectures came a variety of methods, each requiring specialized knowledge and/or coding capability. And with pressure to reduce latency and improve quality, overcoming these barriers reaches a point where a different approach is required.

That is where data integration and its inherent data access capabilities come in. What if it was much simpler to access corporate data for the purpose of reuse and/or integration? And what if that process was non-invasive and standardized across a wide-variety of data types from Mainframe to spreadsheet?

I’ll probably never lose my innate tendency to hoard but if there was a pressing need and a simple way to distribute, track and reuse my stuff, I’d be glad to share! That’s Data Integration!