Informatica Perspectives

Judy Ko recently discussed the difficulties business users have communicating with technical staff, and visa-versa. "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?" she asked, taking the technical side. Conversely, business people frequently complain that technical folks speak a different, strange language. This makes key enterprise projects such as data warehousing, SOA, or data integration that much more difficult, if not impossible, to implement. [Read more]

Last month I posted an article about cloud computing and cloud integration (see Keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds for the full article) and encouraged readers to come to the Architecture and Integration Summit to see Informatica, salesforce.com and Amazon.com tell the story and see a demo. Those that came were not disappointed – the keynote presentation by Sanjay Krishnamurthy, Jeff Barr and Peter Coffee was electrifying! [Read more]

Did you ever have one of those moments where you didn’t know you knew something until you were asked?  I was asked recently to address a question about Master Data Management (MDM) for a Customer Data Integration (CDI) initiative.  As I reflected on my experiences, it dawned on me that over the past 17 years I have been involved in well over a dozen CDI projects, but in the end they all boiled down to three distinctly different strategies.  Each strategy is distinguished by its technical approach, architectural complexity, and value proposition. [Read more]

This blog post is part two of an ongoing series highlighting the importance of data in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I look forward to hearing your thoughts and input on the subject.

I'm back. It's been a little longer than normal, longer than I would have liked. Perhaps that’s because 'addressing SOA's data-centric pitfalls' isn’t easy. (Really it’s because I’ve been working on other things. But let’s get back to the topic at hand.)

One of the benefits of the SOA approach is the ability to think top-down about problems. The usual approach is to work tightly with the business to define your processes from a business perspective, leading to clearly defined services that the business understands and you can implement together.

This is wonderful and has a clarifying symmetry that Software Engineering has been trying to achieve since the days of CASE. But now, here we are in 2008 with the SOA standards defined and the tools available to potentially achieve this vision. Ah, finally, the integration hairball will be contained and life will improve immeasurably for all!

But as I talked about last time, one of the reasons that things aren’t that simple is the data-centric pitfalls. And addressing this problem is not easy if you want to take a long-term, enterprise-oriented approach.

In talking with folks who have walked down this path, struggled with data problems, and are trying to think holistically about a workable longer-term solution, three themes come up again and again: [Read more]

An Integration Competency Center (ICC) can save a ton of money.  You've all seen references from industry analysts singing the praises of Business Intelligence Centers of Excellence (COEs) or ICCs, but most of them are either qualitative statements or, if they have been quantified, they refer to aggregate industry numbers.  For example, here are a couple of headlines from a quick Google search: "Enterprise Business Integration Market to Reach $3.9 Billion" and "Worldwide Network Consulting and Integration Services Spending to Increase 7.8% to Reach $29.3 Million". [Read more]

Just as they say success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, it can also be said that the success of a data integration project is 10% technology and 90% chemistry. And when I say chemistry, I'm not talking about hydrocarbons and nitrates, but the chemistry of people.

The success of any complex data integration depends on how the people that make things happen - the teams of administrators, analysts, managers, end-users, and business partners - can collaborate in establishing the business case, setting requirements, selecting technology, and putting all the pieces together.

However, two of the key players in data integration - analysts and administrators - don't necessarily see eye to eye, and this is costing enterprises in terms of staff resources and quality. [Read more]

The number of articles and blog postings on cloud computing is staggering. Here is one from Chris Boorman Cloud Computing - integration is key which in turn references several other blogs. And check out this Architecture and Integration Summit taking place in Minneapolis on October 30th www.architectureandintegrationsummit.com. Informatica is leading a keynote presentation along with participation from Amazon and Salesforce.com.  The presentation by Sanjay Krishnamurthi, Peter Coffee and Jeff Barr will conclude with a live demo showing how salesforce.com can be integrated with Amazon using Informatica’s On-Demand integration – cloud computing to cloud computing using cloud integration.  [Read more]

In one of my earlier posts I discussed the need for a sophisticated data services-driven technology serving as the foundation for SOA and BPM.

When I was poking around the web recently, I ran into a powerful statement by Michael Blechar from Gartner, covered in the DAMA keynote, titled Survival of the Data Management Fittest:

"Data and processes are intertwined. It will fundamentally change the way organizations think about your roles, and your roles are going to need to evolve".

At this year’s Data Management Association (DAMA) International Symposium,
Michael is quoted saying that:

"In this world there's a very loosely coupled user interface from the assembled services that in turn share access to data. SOA exposes data issues to more people, places and processes, and what I tell companies is that without a focus on information management and meta data management they're going to fail."

It is in speaking to numerous customers, prospects and technologists that I had gathered that without accurate, consistent and timely information, SOA and BPM deployments will face serious information-centric hurdles, affecting the cost-effectiveness and success of the project. As we move towards more agile architectures, I believe that we need to grow typical process-centric approaches to include information centricity as well.

As Michael states:

"Where we are going is beyond the first generation of BPM and SOA [that is process-centric]," he said, "to the next generation of SOA that is information-centric."

Observe that the key word here is "information-centric." Reading such statements from Michael and many others definitely validates the strategy I have been defining for building out an effective IT infrastructure that can benefit from the flexibility of a services and process-driven approach, in the data integration layer. Simply wrapping data access with a web service does not qualify as a sophisticated data service and hence, stringing together such simple services with a BPM tool also does not guarantee agility.

As discussed in Services to Orient your Enterprise Data Layer, Joe McKendrick is of the opinion that neither SOA nor enterprise-application integration alone can effectively handle the enterprise data layer. However, data services delivered within an SOA framework can create a data-abstraction layer to address the complexities seen across enterprise data environments.

I have always said that without serving up good quality, consistent and timely information as a data service or a comprehensive data service built using a sophisticated data integration platform, SOA and BPM deployments will not be able to deliver on their promise of agility.

What are your experiences? What kind of information-centric issues have you run into in your service-oriented deployments? Is inaccurate, stale and inconsistent information passing through your IT infrastructure holding you back?

To date many companies have fragmented their integration efforts across applications and groups. The classic split is between the group developing data warehouse and business intelligence applications versus the ERP (enterprise resource application) applications. Typically with this fragmentation different integration approaches are taken with ETL being what is used with data warehousing /business intelligence and either EAI or EII used with the ERP applications. In addition to these integration silos, many companies today have, or are launching SOA (service oriented architecture) initiatives generally independent of either the data warehousing/business intelligence or ERP applications.

If achieving consistent numbers across reporting is a goal maybe the investments should be in data integration. When people look at inconsistent reports or analysis that use different BI tools it is easy to understand why they assume the problem is using different tools. Using different BI tools, however, is a symptom rather than the reason for the inconsistent numbers. The symptom is silos using different BI tools but the underlying reason are data silos created using different data integration tools, processes, standards and people. The best practice is to establish an ICC (Integration Competency Center.)

ICCs also need to take into account the BI practice. There has been a good deal of attention paid to BI tools over the years. Many companies have instituted a BI-CC (business intelligence competency center), a concept promoted by Gartner research. [Read more]

Governance is a tricky and ill-defined area. For example, in the emerging SOA space, listen to the drumbeat of messages from consultants, analysts, and vendors, and the message is clear: Service oriented architecture won’t work without governance.

However, establishing effective governance has been a vexing challenge, with a lot of disagreement and debate amongst governance proponents. [Read more]