Information assets across an enterprise may be dispersed across a myriad of repositories, both structured (e.g. ERP, transactional systems) and semi-structured or free-form (e.g. e-mail, blogs, spreadsheets). Data integration is required to support the veracity of data that co-exists across all such repositories within acceptable boundaries of timeliness and quality.
Two of primary ways organizations can accomplish enterprise data integration is with data warehousing and search/query solutions.
Enterprise Data Warehousing – The data warehouse is the foundation of the business intelligence system and a primary determinant in the ultimate value it can provide to end users is quality of its data model. A well thought-out data model that is specifically designed to support the end-user’s information and analytical needs is critical to ensuring success. Profiling the data in source systems to understand availability and quality as well a developing software programs that extract, cleanse, transform, and load data into the EDW are all part of this process.
Enterprise Search/Query – Locating and retrieving data from multiple, federated sources using precision/recall ranking and pattern matching capabilities is another way that organizations are achieving enterprise data integration. This is done by creating repeatable workflow processes to tag, classify and cleanup document data which allow users to search for pre-defined, dynamically updated reports based upon metadata housed in disparate BI and reporting tool repositories.
Claraview consultants are experts not only in working with traditional transactional source systems but also in working with unstructured and semi-structured sources (e.g., free form text used for shopper surveys, text notes completed during call center calls, website blogs, mail exchanges). Increasingly, organizations are looking to incorporate source data that is in text or other unstructured form into a data warehouse/decision support environment. This merging of knowledge management and business intelligence makes it possible use existing BI tools to analyze and visualize integrated data sets.