Informatica Perspectives

In my last post Business Intelligence, Light and Fast (Part 1), I talked about how Web 2.0 technologies hold a lot promise for the spread of BI. But how are organizations putting this approach into everyday practice? [Read more]

Can business intelligence benefit from the current excitement around the rise of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0? Some say the intersection of BI and Web 2.0 will advance us into “Business Intelligence 2.0,” which promises up-to-date information and actionable insights about every aspect of the business. Fellow blogger Rick Sherman recently observed that BI 2.0 isn’t just about tools and technologies, but about “getting more comprehensive, consistent, correct and current data…. We can finally interweave data from the data warehouse with real-time and event-driven data via our data integration efforts.”

Can Web 2.0 make the promise of BI 2.0 more of a reality? [Read more]

If banks and financial institutions had invested in more data integration and business intelligence tools to spot issues arising within their portfolios, could they have avoided the recent credit mess?

Perhaps, to a degree. But it is human beings that are ultimately making the risk judgments, and oftentimes, bad decisions may have looked good at the time they were made.

Still, technology has improved to the point where troubles could have been more effectively flagged. [Read more]

Okay, so the band Coldplay will never release a song by that title (and I probably wouldn't want to hear it if they did.)  But it would be timely, because despite certain rumors to the contrary, data warehousing is thriving.

We weren't supposed to need data warehousing in an era of SOA/data services, data federation and other new-fangled technologies.  Data warehousing was old-fashioned and tired and a bit boring.  But the need for data warehousing solutions just continues to grow– companies aren't getting less data, and their environments aren't getting simpler.  The discipline of integrating data from multiple systems and conforming it to a common structure so that is can be analyzed and used for business intelligence and reporting is still invaluable.  This is not to say that the new technologies don't play a role– they can greatly enhance data warehousing by providing more real-time data and new ways of delivering data where it's needed. [Read more]