Organisations today live and die based on their ability to exploit their most valuable corporate asset - data.
Data drives the systems that support daily business functions and monitor performance. It serves as the raw material for the production of business information, the basis for strategic planning and the backbone for effective marketing and sales programs.
The bottomline, says Simon Jeggo, GM for Ardent South Africa`s data warehousing division, is that in order to survive, every company must be able to manage its data effectively and be able to exploit the information locked within it.
"It`s come down to survival of the fittest," says Jeggo. "If a modern enterprise is to have longevity, "then its information management systems must also evolve. For example, data warehousing has evolved to leverage online transaction data to support decision-making, while enterprise information portals hold the promise of extending data warehousing."
Today`s successful IT systems not only conform to the needs of the business: they are becoming part of the business process. The underlying data management infrastructure a company selects to power its business applications is an important factor in determining the success of a company.
As a complement to this the company must also put in place a separate, yet integrated information infrastructure. Its ability to leverage the information assets locked within the data is key to the success of a modern organisation.
"Smart companies understand the value of leveraging new information management strategies to gain competitive advantage," adds Jeggo.
Today`s business agenda is a relentless pursuit of innovation and leadership through the smart use of IT. This leads to a new concept: not the Global 2000, but the "Digital 2000" - those companies that maximise their use of IT, internally and externally, to build a leadership position.
"The key characteristic of the Digital 2000," notes Jeggo, "is that they spend twice as much on IT as their counterparts. Their data management strategy is tightly linked with strategic vision. In that sense, their IT is the cornerstone of their strategic plan."
Today`s successful IT systems are not only conforming to the needs of the business, they are becoming part of the business process itself. The infrastructure a company puts in place to maximise the support of the business is crucial to its success.
A major factor today is the influence of the Web on enterprise IT trends. The Web`s versatile infrastructure is fuelling the current trend of more closely linking customers and suppliers.
"The Web is creating new opportunities to build a closer relationship with anyone that has a vested interest in your business. It provides an easy-to-use, simple development and deployment mechanism for applications such as e-commerce, supply chain management and customer relationship management. In addition, the Web is providing an evolutionary path for existing applications."
However, Jeggo adds, today`s Web-enabled applications fuel the information explosion and raise traditional data management challenges - such as scalability, reliability and consistency, to new levels. Add to this huge and varied user communities and new and innovative approaches are required.
"Web-enabled solutions also present other potential challenges, such as handling security on distributed Web and OLTP servers. On top of all of this, users expect fast response times regardless of the challenges to the enterprise, such as load balancing and support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere in the world."
Moving logically onto the evolutionary path, this is the development of the enterprise information infrastructure concept that embraces everything from documents and Web pages to multiple databases, groupware applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, business intelligence, data warehousing and document management. The portal offers a highly personalised, integrated view of those data sources. But this requires an infrastructure that can reach, interpret, combine and present the various data sources intelligently. This is the core tenet behind the emerging term enterprise information management (EII).
IT infrastructure will continue to evolve, bringing even greater value to the business by permitting faster and better business decision-making. This will be possible through the use of a coherent mechanism that categorises data and uses the Web to provide access to the entire corporation`s information resources. This approach reduces information fragmentation and raises the value of even the smallest information snippet to equal footing, if it is the right piece of information at the right person`s fingertips, empowering every member of the organisation.
More types of data
The next evolution of data warehousing, predicts Jeggo, is providing customers with the ability to add more diverse types of data into their data warehouse environment. "Customers are looking to add unstructured data to their enterprise information architecture. A portal provides an easy way to distribute that information to a large population of end-users.
"The bigger challenge, however, is in extracting the various data from wherever it resides, transforming and manipulating it, and producing information. Then storing and managing it in a central data warehouse or repository. In addition, you need to provide an information directory using meta data to facilitate navigation."
Most companies already have the beginnings of a foundation in place. Internet search engines such as Yahoo and AltaVista, for example, expertly provide a comprehensive and categorised view of all available Web sites of interest on a particular topic. They are the Internet catalogues of global content but lack the concept of intelligent information.
"The search engine concept can be applied to your own business and the evolution of your enterprise`s IT structure," says Jeggo. "The value proposition is quite simple: enterprise information is turned into a more valuable asset because it is instantly accessible. This approach isn`t too dissimilar to data warehousing, but with greater diversity."
A portal can provide the same search and data delivery that we`ve come to expect from the Web, while adding a layer of intelligence - filtering, summarising and organising information in a personalised manner. And a corporate portal can do this while relieving the user of the burden of going to, learning and accessing a myriad IT systems. It`s one-stop-shopping with a user-oriented mindset.
Simon Jeggo looks back at the early days of computing:
. When the business community first embraced computerisation, centralised corporate functions were the first area to receive attention. The goal was to achieve greater accuracy and repeatability in managing the volume of information that needed processing.
. Yet as the enterprise came to depend more and more on these "back-office" applications, a new set of data management issues arose: how to organise data and applications in operational systems to process large volumes of transactions quickly, reliably and securely, while assuring recoverability, security and transaction completion.
. Companies questioned the effectiveness of supporting applications through the use of large IT staff, producing a push for solutions that reduced total cost of ownership. This, in turn, resulted in IT`s evolution towards OLTP.
So arose today`s ubiquitous OLTP systems. Their widespread adoption and growth has led to new challenges which have driven evolution within corporate IT systems. Support for new platforms, movement towards distributed architectures, two-tier, three-tier and now new browser-based architectures have all pushed the limits of OLTP environments.
OLTP brought automation benefits, but within the realms of IT staff who created reporting mechanisms that represented their view of the business. Business did not share the same perspective. IT couldn`t respond fast enough to the increasing demand for better and more information. Data warehousing arose to serve the need for better decision support.
The solution is products and services for creating and managing data warehouse environments. This includes extracting the right data from its source locations - any operational system, including mainframes - cleaning up data quality problems and reformatting it for analytical use.
As important is the task of creating or collecting contextual information, or meta data, which allows users to understand and interpret the data sets generated for the warehouse.
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