If you are like most companies, you are trying to take advantage of the benefits of Business Intelligence (BI), data convergence, and virtualization. But the data silos present in every organization hinder the opportunity to take advantage of the hidden values of the data your enterprise collects daily. Taking charge and making sense of your data is the only way to compete in an increasingly data-driven marketplace. The advantages in cost savings, new customer insights and new business opportunities are enormous.
But to get those advantages you have to get rid of all of your information silos. Some will prove more difficult to integrate than others. To make sure you get it right, you have to keep three issues in mind: the type of data you are integrating, getting a full accounting of your data and your resources, and matters pertaining to compliance.
The first task in any data integration project is to take an account of the amount and the type of data you will be integrating. The level of complication in this process has a lot to do with the type of company you are. Retail companies are often the most complicated. Marketing, sales teams and supply chain managers may use entirely different storage types, databases, and ways of referring to the same product. Tagging and processing that data can be time consuming and labor intensive. Data warehousing software exists to pull the data together, but knowledge of the types of pitfalls you might encounter is important. You must work extensively with all departments to catalogue the types of data they each work with to avoid data duplication and ineffective tagging.
Just as different departments in your enterprise likely use different ways to store and tag data, they likely have different physical assets. And no matter how disciplined your organization, they likely have some hardware that is “off the reservation.” It is important to track the authorized and unauthorized hardware in order to make sure you capture all the data you intended to integrate. Asset management software is common inside the data center, but servers and other assets in remote locations can sometimes slip through the cracks. And some of these lost assets can be the biggest keys to your BI efforts, since they represent the biggest silos in your enterprise.
Finally, it is important to take compliance seriously in your data integration policies. Regulations often require certain types of data be kept for varying amounts of time and with varying levels of security based on the sensitivity of the data. Data de-duplication and virtualization efforts can leave important data vulnerable. In addition to the dangers of missing or deleted data, eliminating silos can mean that archives might need to be redesigned to handle newly consolidated data.
Handling all three of these needs with some forethought will help you manage your data integration more effectively. Whether you are using data warehousing software or semantic integration or any other method of integration, you can’t get the full advantages of data integration without a unified data plan.
For more information, see:
Why Is It so Hard to Build User-Friendly Business Intelligence Tools?
Data De-Duplication & SSD: A Perfect Match
Can Desktop Virtualization Deliver Security Benefits?
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