Informatica Perspectives

All of us in the data management and integration arena know how difficult and time-consuming it can be to understand business requirements and ensure that data warehousing and other implementations actually meet the real needs of the business.  How many of us have spent days or even weeks in tedious requirements gathering sessions, asking what the business wants, and getting very fuzzy answers back?   It’s hard to ask the right questions which the business can actually answer, and even then, it’s highly likely that the documented requirements are incomplete or inaccurate.  Dan Lindstedt has an intriguing posting on the topic of business requirements that’s well worth a read.

One of the fundamental problems is that the business does understand their data, what’s wrong with it, and what they need to be changed.  But translating that into language that IT can understand can be a very tedious and often precarious endeavor.  So why not short-circuit the translation process?

We have heard a common request from many of our customers over the years—provide the business analysts with tools where they can analyze the data themselves, and specify their business rules. This business specification can then be handed off to developers in IT for enhancement, completion and tuning in a data warehousing environment.

Such tools have to be designed with the skill sets of the analyst, rather than a developer, in mind.  They can’t simply be a stripped-down version of an ETL or data integration development tool.  Informatica started down this path with its data quality tools, IDQ and IDE, which are designed for data quality specialists in the business to analyze data and design cleansing rules.

More recently, we introduced the new Mapping Analyst for Excel capability with PowerCenter 8.6.  It actually co-opts Excel, which of course is the tool of choice for many analysts now for capturing requirements and specifications.  Instead of merely using Excel as a documentation tool, as is typical currently, it makes Excel active.  Analysts can specify mapping rules such as expressions and filters, reflecting their business rules.  These mapping specifications can then actually be imported from Excel and used to generate preliminary mappings in PowerCenter, which developers can then refine or optimize as necessary.  This circumvents a lot of the “lost in translation” issues, because instead of developers trying to interpret Excel and Word documentation, they actually start with business rules specified by the analyst, manifested in PowerCenter mappings.  In a nutshell, this is designed to enhance collaboration and productivity in your data warehousing and business intelligence practice.

At Informatica, we’re making a lot of investments in tools designed for analysts, to streamline the business-IT collaboration process and ensure that IT deliverables better meet the true business need.   It’s not an easy problem to solve, but it’s well worth the effort.