Enterprise Information Integration

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Agile Data Access and Agile Business Intelligence. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): Optimization and transformation, really fundamentally it’s all about for all the data that’s been cleansed within your agile data access environment so that everybody is working from a common set of master data and from the very best models and views and analytics available at any point in time within your extended value chain and that way you push the bar forward to seize new opportunities before your competitors get there.

So that’s the broad vision and that’s really the broad program you need to implement to enable agile data access. Now in terms of architecting and I am not going to spend an inordinate amount of time on this particular slide because clearly as you can see it gets fairly involved. Typically when you have structured data that’s often the normal form and traditional RDBMS, that clearly is very important, that clearly is the core for most companies data services efforts.

Monitoring of Social Media for Sentiment Analysis

But going forward as you roll out agile data access thinking in the broader context of agile information services where it includes semi-structured information such as XML documents and unstructured information that you may be sourcing from enterprise content management systems or social media, let’s say you are doing monitoring of social media for sentiment analysis, you need to think through bringing all that information into your agile data access environment in a unified way.

So really that’s where direct access to operational data stores, such as what Style Intelligence provides, comes in. The very first big bullet point here, you need to have a direct access to all this disparate information no matter what the source format is. And the information will not be just in your data warehouse. It will be in your transaction processing systems like CRM and ERP. It will be in various internal systems like those and external systems as well. It will be in various formats. Some of that will be at a very granular transaction level, some will be highly aggregated. Regardless you need to provide a mashed up, unified and simplified access to it all.

It’s often called data federation or enterprise information integration or data virtualization, of course. That’s critically important. That’s a key enabler. You also need to normalize access to this information meaning within your agile data access infrastructure, transform it, convert it to some set of canonical object models or schemas or views that can then be all rolled up in a unified way and administered and accessed through a common set of APIs and interfaces and the like.

Previous: An Agile Data Access Environment

Next: Virtualized Data Warehousing