The NEXT BIG THING Is Here – Informatica 9

For those of you who have been following my blog for some time, you no doubt remember the May article on THE NEXT BIG THING and the 10 Weeks to Lean Integration series. You also hopefully recall the discussions about the Integration Factory being the dominant integration platform technology for the next decade. While elements of the factory capability have been around for years, the Informatica 9 platform now offers the ability to build high-speed, efficient, “green” integrations with seamless collaboration between Business and IT.

Organizations have been implementing factory elements for years using a combination of custom workflows and standard Informatica functionality. If we go back to PowerCenter 6 or earlier, some organizations implemented shared capabilities and self-service portals using custom metadata extensions and custom user interfaces. Every successive release of the Informatica platform has added more and more out of the box capability to the point were Informatica 9 is the most sophisticated “out of the box” factory yet.

To be clear, there is always room to add even more automated capability so the ICC staff and Lean Integration teams will continue to have opportunities for even greater efficiency and improvements in productivity and cycle-time, but the out-of-the-box functionality is a huge step in enabling highly efficient integration assembly lines. As a refresher, here are the 7 lean principles:

Focus on Customer, Eliminate Waste (i.e. “green”)
Continuously Improve
Empower the Team
Optimize the Whole
Plan for Change and Mass Customize
Automate Processes and Deliver Fast
Build Quality In

Let’s compare these principles to the primary themes and focus of Informatica 9: SOA-Based Data Services, Pervasive Data Quality, and Business-IT Collaboration. Business-IT Collaboration is critical for focusing on the customer (the business IS the customer) and eliminating waste. Business-IT Collaboration involves empowering business teams by supporting self-service capabilities such as the ability for the business to profile data, create business rules, and monitor data quality without the typical dependence on IT. Wasted activities are eliminated due to the “High-Fidelity Collaboration” capability, meaning that metadata artefacts are shared between business and IT and appear to each in the manner appropriate to their needs, yet they are still operating on the same objects. This reduces waste because translation problems don’t crop up like they used to when the business works with spreadsheets which need to be translated into implementation-level details by IT using different tools. In other words, in Informatica 9 “quality is built in” from the start rather than being “inspected in” during an integration test.

Pervasive Data Quality systematically builds quality in. Different roles such as stewards, architects, developers, etc. have role-appropriate tools to understand and improve the quality of data. These tools support all data types (customer, product, vendor, accounts, etc), have built-in AddressDoctor Version 5 capabilities and geo-coding, and have full read/write access capabilities – in short everything the Informatica platform can access at high performance. What’s more, the tools have the ability to manage the business rules around data quality as part of the integration layer rather than have the logic contained elsewhere. This enables loose coupling and rapid change in support of the Lean plan for change principle.

SOA-based Data Services further allows loose coupling with the data services layer which dramatically helps on the plan for change front. Whether wishing to read or write data using SQL or Web Services, with small messages or large datasets, in real-time or in batch, the “multi-modal data provisioning services” (which means that the same data object definitions can be used for all these different styles of access through a common definition and platform), means less waste because the simplified management of these capabilities is in one place. Further simplifying management is the ability to administer the policies governing the SLAs of these data objects in one place. With this Data Services layer, companies will be able to eliminate the integration ‘hairball’ far more effectively, by reducing the waste which comes from the complexity of the historical point-to-point approach. Further, having data profiling capabilities available at the fingertips of architects and developers reduces waste because of the in-depth understanding of the data at the point in time when the data service abstraction layer is being defined.

To complete the picture, following are the Informatica 9 themes and key capabilities which support the Lean integration principles:

SOA-Based Data Services