Informatica Perspectives

Are BI managers and professionals sometimes too eager to please the business? Are centralized BI efforts slowing down progress? Should BI teams address requirements before the business even asks for them? These questions may seem counter-intuitive, but Wayne Eckerson, director of research for TDWI, says that the best intentions for BI efforts in many organizations may actually result in sluggish projects, duplication of effort, and misaligned priorities between BI teams and the business. [Read more]

Any budget crunches that hit organizations this year may not directly affect enterprise data management initiatives, but EDM and associated middleware will be called upon to help businesses through turbulent times. [Read more]

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.
[Read more]

I’m already making my flight arrangements for the 10th Annual Informatica World Conference in Las Vegas this year. [Read more]

Tom Davenport has a great post “IT’s Wonderful Life” in his interesting “The Next Big Thing” blog. With the backdrop of the holiday season and the sentimental movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart, he muses in his post about the positive things IT has contributed to companies. He cites Wal-Mart (WMT), various airlines and the banking industry as all having benefited from IT’s efforts.

I’d like to take his praise a step further by observing that all his examples are great references for the business benefit of enterprise data warehousing and enterprise data management.

All of these companies have positioned data as an enterprise asset that, when integrated and transformed, enables them to manage far better than if they were simply operating by “gut feel.”
[Read more]

Happy New Year! I look forward to discussing a myriad of Enterprise Data Management topics with you this year. My work with customers never stops and I’ve made a 2008 resolution to share as much of their success as possible. I’ll start with one of the oldest but least addressed problems in Data Integration.

Have you ever asked yourself or been asked, “Where did that number come from?” or, if you’re in IT, have you been confronted by your business colleagues with “Those numbers don’t make sense!” I find these to be very common questions that consume hours and days of business and IT analyst time. Think about it, at the grass roots level of every company or organization, the amount of time spent deciphering numbers from reports is staggering.

This challenge starts from the very beginning of intelligence gathering, underlying data from operational systems. It’s why the first step in any data integration project (DW, Migration, MDM, Consolidation, etc…) is to understand and map out the nature and location of the data appropriate for the business problem at hand. An estimated 70 percent of the time spent on any corporate application development is dedicated to finding, identifying, reconciling, and verifying data, and then determining the consequences of modifying the data. This is what makes traditional integration projects so time- and resource-intensive—and what makes metadata so useful in exercising internal control or streamlining a myriad of related activities. The recent Informatica Release 8.5 launch highlighted “data lineage” for helping IT resolve questions for the business as well as providing “self service” for answering data-related questions for analysts and developers.
[Read more]

The recent Informatica Release 8.5 launch highlighted Real-time Integration Competency Centers (ICCs) as the optimal model for successful data integration. I’d like to review the concept of the Real-time ICC and why Release 8.5 supports this advanced operational, organizational and technology model.

As data integration moves beyond the realm of data warehousing into operational integration, real-time and data services use cases have exploded in importance to the business and necessitated stronger, unified infrastructure for IT to meet the challenge. Philip Russom, Senior Manager, TDWI Research captures this trend specifically in his quote on Release 8.5.

"The movement toward real-time data access and delivery has been the most influential trend in data integration this decade. The trend has enabled user organizations to initiate a variety of valuable real-time practices, including operational BI, real-time data warehousing, on-demand computing, performance monitoring, just-in-time inventory, and so on. And the trend has led vendors to extend their data integration products, so that many functions operate in real-time, not just batch. Informatica 8.5 is a great example of this trend, because it’s re-architected to support more real-time and on-demand functions for data integration, changed data capture, and data quality." [Read more]

Take a step back for a minute and ask yourself if your organization is ready for enterprise data warehousing (EDW). Or, if you're already doing it, how is it going – I mean, how is it really going? And no matter how successful you’ve been, what can you do next for your business?

Many of us are in the budgeting phase, planning how to spend our budgets for 2008. Traditionally, we make our personal New Year's resolutions in December, looking back over the previous year to see what we want to improve. But in business the best time for that retrospection is NOW so that you have time to influence what you do next year. Part of that retrospection should be assessing your readiness for EDW.

EDW is a process. It is not as simple as switching on a light switch and you suddenly have EDW capability and benefits.

Your enterprise must understand and commit the people, processes and products necessary to achieving an EDW solution that establishes data as your corporate asset.

This is why my recent white paper, A Case for Assessing Your Enterprise Data Warehousing Readiness, encourages readers to take Informatica's free online enterprise data warehousing assessment.

The EDW assessment helps you evaluate where you are and helps you start creating the blueprint to get you to EDW. And, just as with a house, you need that blueprint to successfully build the house you want.

Experience has shown that companies that are successful with EDW had a clear understanding of their requirements from the beginning. They undertook the process in phases, using checks and balances to ensure that each step met their goals.

An enterprise data warehousing assessment assists you in examining where you are, where you should be and finally recommends how to achieve an EDW solution. The assessment steps:

• Ascertain your current environment and existing business needs

• Compare above with industry best practices and benchmark your firm with other firms along the progression from management reporting to EDW

• Perform a gap analysis between where you are and where you should be

• Recommend what steps would help move you towards an EDW solution

You wouldn't drive down the highway with your eyes shut, so why would you approach EDW without knowing where you're going? Give the assessment a try, and let me know how you did by leaving a comment here, or sending me an email.

We’ve been discussing the three pillars of an ICC, organization, process and technology, for a while now. In this segment, I’ll focus on a range of technology requirements facing ICC implementations teams, whether they are starting from scratch or morphing a set of disparate solutions into a common infrastructure. It goes without saying, to meet the demand of a broader set of enterprise needs rather than those of a single line of business, the infrastructure powering an ICC needs to evolve and mature.

High Availability
One of the first aspects related to infrastructure is the need for high availability. This pertains to the overall integration infrastructure environment. “Shared Infrastructure” by its very nature increases the need for reliability. An outage of a single point solution is acceptable and explainable but when several organizations are relying on solutions delivered by an ICC, outages can significantly impact revenue and productivity.

[Read more]

I’ve been writing on ICC’s (Integration Competency Centers) in previous posts but thought some additional information on the models I’ve seen implemented within various organizations is in order.

Most organizations start down the ICC path do so to address the “project silo” problem, where a divisional or project team may be struggling to meet deadlines or success metrics while another team is clicking along delivering value to the business. These teams may or may not be sharing similar technology and approach but the glaring need to improve is recognized and the business case straight forward, especially if organizational boundaries aren’t in the way of change.

What options are available? [Read more]