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Managing Information Intellgently
Rahul Sah
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Data is everywhere, but the key is to extract relevant information from that
data. A typical enterprise would have several business applications, each having
its own data store. Now for making any business decision, information needs to
be gathered across these disparate data stores, which is quite a handful task.
Enterprise Information Management is a technique that makes this task simpler
and provides a holistic view of an organization's information, panning across
different applications and processes.
In today's competitive business environment, information exchange takes place
quite frequently. Organizations should have the required tools to manage this
information and take timely decisions to remain competitive. Unfortunately all
this information is scattered across multiple systems which can't talk to each
other. Moreover, data in these systems is inconsistent and at times not
up-to-date. So, if you need to scour through multiple business applications,
databases and spreadsheets to find relevant data for decision making, then you
need an effective enterprise information management (EIM) solution to organize
your data infrastructure.
Today most enterprises have adopted Business Intelligence solutions to help
in decision making processes, but results from such solutions are as good as the
data that is fed into them. Within an enterprise there are different functional
information silos, like production, human resource, finance or CRM, each of
which has valuable information. However, most reporting or BI solutions are
bound to a particular package, thus having access to limited information. To
maximize their performance, enterprises require timely and consistent access to
trustworthy information which pans across the enterprise and is not bound to any
particular information silo. To accomplish this task, organizations should have
an Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy in place that combines
technologies for data integration, data quality, data modeling and metadata
management. With an EIM strategy in place, enterprises can integrate their BI
solutions on top of it to have a deeper level of insight and visibility into the
data.
What is EIM?
Enterprise Information Management as defined by Gartner is “an
organizational commitment to define, secure and improve the accuracy and
integrity of information assets and to resolve semantic inconsistencies across
all boundaries to support technical, operational and business objectives of a
company's enterprise architecture strategy.”
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Tarun Agarwal,
Director Technology, Path Infotech |
EIM will play, rather is playing a very important role in enabling
enterprises to accurately define the source of data, which derives
information. Take a classical example of three official entities - the
Customer, Employee, and Vendor. Can we categorize all the three into one
entity such as Business Associate?
Many Indian enterprises still lack the vision to understand the nuances of
enterprise wide information management strategy. Some are into early stages
of data consolidation, identification of source of data and ensuring the
data is managed through a single process only, whereas the usage of data
(information/analytics) could be manifold. Today's scenario is a shift from
data capture to wholesome view of engagements, be at discovery level or at
service delivery level. It is becoming imperative to have an information
management practice in place at an organizational level for better
understating of data and content. |
EIM is not a packaged solution or a technology, but is a process wherein an
enterprise implements services for organizing, structuring and managing their
various information assets. The objective is to integrate the business goals of
the organization with technology to help in management of information to
simplify business processes, and enhance information visibility across different
organizational functions. To architect an EIM strategy there are many components
that can be implemented, including data warehousing, data governance and data
integration technologies. And business intelligence has become an integral piece
for a successful EIM implementation.
For any enterprise, there are various business applications that have their
own information stores, and all these combined create the universe of data for
an enterprise's business, so a lot more than just the ERP or a CRM system. To
have proper information, an enterprise should look at its enterprise wide data
universe and not just into a particular business application's data landscape.
Also as enterprise data increases in leaps and bounds, there are instances where
information gets replicated in different business applications, as there is
absence of relationship management amongst them. A proper way of gathering,
using and storing data can help in better information management for an
organization. Most have already started to realize this. And EIM is the way to
achieve this. It provides the ability to manage all information regardless of
the format or location, taking all regulatory compliances into account.
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George Langley,
Executive Vice President Products, Mastersoft |
The significance of a single customer view is to find out what
relationship a customer is having with the organization, for instance if
it's a telecom company, then a customer could be having an account for his
mobile connection, at his residence he might also be having an Internet
connection from the same company, and he could also be having an additional
mobile connection by his wife's name. To bring such information together is
what a single customer view is all about. So through a single window one can
see all the relationships of a customer with the organization. In the
absence of this single interface, a person would be required to fetch
information manually from different silos to know about a customer.
Therefore with a single customer view an enterprise can have governance in
place. With a relationship model made for the organization's information
architecture, when different silos or BI solutions want to access
information, they get all relationships from the model. EIM helps in
re-usability and interoperability of information between disparate data
sources. |
EIM planning
The mantra for a successful enterprise information management strategy is to
have interoperability for information amongst different business applications
and also re-usability of information. They must understand the interdependency
of information in order to plan an effective EIM initiative. An EIM strategy
will allow business users to have access to different types of information
coming from multiple data sources across the enterprise. It is imperative for
them to identify data stores for information, and then through data quality
methodologies, that data should be cleansed, profiled and marked for
relationships. With open standard formats, the integration of data amongst
disparate business applications needs to be done. On top of it you need to
provide a metadata management layer for information access and retrieval. The
information thus accessed through an information portal can have data being fed
from disparate operational data stores or silos rather than from one single
information store (for instance ERP or CRM systems).
The initial phase for an EIM strategy is to have information metadata
definition in place, followed by data consolidation strategies to gather data
into one single repository, something like an enterprise data mart (EDM). The
organization then can gradually move on to have Master Data Management where
data collection, data updation, and data quality can be managed through one
single interface. The final process in EIM is to disseminate the information
gathered from various data silos and show it in a single window. This can be a
dashboard view in a portal. EIM initiatives help an organization to improve
understanding of business processes, organizational roles, data management and
data ownership throughout the enterprise. This in turn promotes collaboration
and cooperation required to create a single view of an enterprise's processes or
services. As we said earlier, EIM is not a technology, but an architecture. It
combines various methodologies, some of which include: data integration; data
movement cross platform with ETL tools; data profiling; data quality assurance;
metadata management; and master data management. None of these technologies are
new or revolutionary, and have been widely used in data warehousing, information
analytics and reporting, and also in business intelligence tools. What is
different is that in EIM these technologies are used for more integration, and
use an SOA approach for exchange protocols that enable capabilities such as data
management and help provide a single information view, which is also called as a
'single customer view.'
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Sudesh Prabhu,
Director- Pre-sales & services, Sybase |
Lot of people focus on structured data, but there's a lot of information
around as that is in the unstructured form. In certain business verticals
there's stream data that comes in, plus there's a lot of information being
carried by executives on their laptops. All this information is essentially
important from a business perspective, but it is never seen that way; it has
always been seen in a specific 'application silo' perspective. With EIM, the
information fabric that an organization creates helps in being
cost-effective and in improving performance. Moreover, besides helping in
compliance and governance initiatives, EIM can also be helpful in organizing
an information layer that could be used by business applications which rely
on real-time data, as in stock exchanges. |
Metadata management
For any EIM strategy, it is metadata management which is the foundational
component. The business users in an organization do not have access to
enterprise wide information while making business decisions. Therefore, metadata
management initiative is required to provide information context to systems,
applications, interfaces, resources and data that compromises an enterprise's
information assets.
A metadata initiative benefits in giving data governance by providing context
to information resources and providing easy access to that information to
business users within the organization. When an enterprise's metadata management
is structured in a manner that it can look back at key information from the data
source, ETL processes and databases, then the accuracy of reports and analytics
of BI solutions also increase dramatically. Thus, by having an EIM strategy, an
enterprise can have the same visibility across different functional departments
in the enterprise, which in turn results in better governance. Also by having a
BI solution integrated with the EIM strategy, business users can have easy
access to meaningful, accurate and timely information for taking business
decisions.
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