Informatica Perspectives

Years ago when I taught database design at the local college I remember defining the data within a business as one of the most valuable assets a business has. I’m not sure most of my students bought that, but I still stand by that assertion and it’s much more apparent today. Indeed, today data is a huge business asset that we’re learning to finally exploit, understanding relationships and the context of other meaningful data sets, inside and outside of the enterprise.

The best example I can provide around the power of data is the number of flight tracking and estimating systems out there on the Web these days. These systems mashup the flight status data from the airlines, which are often wrong, with statistics around the make and model of the plane, the capabilities of the pilots, the weather, and other factors that will affect the early or late arrival of the flight. As a result, you can check a flight and pretty much determine the time the flight will actually arrive. This is very handy to me as a frequent flyer, and spot on most of the time.

Just as this system is able to predict when flights will actually arrive, you can leverage your data to do much of the same thing for your business. For example, the ability to determine sales patterns based on key economic indicators, which is typically standard practice these days. Or, more obscure but valuable, the ability to track productivity estimations for a manufacturing plant based on the on-time record of your raw material providers, as related to the weather, as related to the existing traffic. Also, considering illness data to determine the number of employees that will likely call in sick, as well as the failure rates of the equipment based on their lifecycles, and efficiency of each employee who is on the job during a particular shift. This is an actual working system.

Of course we’ve been implementing business intelligence (BI) solutions for years to cull from the data the information we need. While these solutions are powerful unto themselves, lacking from most of these solutions has been the ability to consider our own data in the context of other data points that are relevant. The emerging Web, including cloud computing, is providing us with new ways to consider our data, looking at all things influencing our business, but have been difficult to track until recently. Now APIs exists that provide everything from real time traffic and weather information, to competency of pilots flying your airplane.

Moreover, beyond mashing up your data with external data points, you also have the ability to combine data from different areas of the company to provide enhanced intelligence. For instance, sales statistics as related to the number of dropped calls coming into the call center, or employee productivity as related to the increasing benefits.

While many of you won’t find this as new information, most organizations don’t exploit their data to the benefit of the business. Instead it’s something that just tracks the business, but does not drive it. This is changing quickly, as the power of data becomes much more apparent.