Given the importance of Business Intelligence across all aspects of today's business environment, and the ever increasing number of blog postings and published articles on the topic, I felt that my July blog posting was ready for a refresh and expansion.
The value of business intelligence (BI) is well-proven. In any case, I’ll leave it up to the slew of BI vendors to make that point. This discussion is how data integration acts as the foundation for enabling all the goodness that BI brings to the enterprise.
In order for any organization to leverage the operational benefits of business intelligence, to comply with governmental or industry regulations, or simply to make well-informed decisions, they must have a solid data foundation. The point of all this is that your business intelligence platform is only as good as the data it operates on. And the data it operates on is typically brought to the BI platform through some sort of data integration layer. Simply speaking, it’s critical to get the data integration “right” if you’re embarking on a BI initiative.
Data comes from many different places, is in many different formats – Cloud-based data, legacy data, data in spreadsheets, data in different databases, data inside of operational applications, data inside SaaS applications, etc. Just “getting at” data can be a challenge. Then the real fun begins, as data can also be famously difficult to reconcile – dealing with semantics and metadata issues, cleansing and remediating data, matching and merging data.
Although many organizations start off with a homegrown approach to data integration, which may initially appear to be cost effective, this quick and dirty approach rarely leads to a happy ending. Even if the homegrown solution is able to deliver the same “quality” of data, and even if there may appear to be initial savings (which may or may not be the case), these hard-coded solutions are ineffective at dealing with the two key issues facing any data integration scenario – increasing variety and increasing rate of change. As time progresses, the disadvantages of a hand-built solution increase dramatically.
It’s not unusual for organizations to spend anywhere between hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars on BI implementations, and then use those tools to make decisions that impact the future of their organization. With all that at stake, a solid data integration platform isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.