New approaches shift focus from technical to application support

There is a paradigm shift under way in both the data integration and data quality markets. With the growing realisation that data is a core business driver, business is pushing IT to deliver to ever tighter deadlines. At the same time, IT departments are being hit by a global skills shortage and are forced to tighten their belts and do more with less. The focus for business users is to find solutions that are cost-effective and that provide groundbreaking ease of use to enable business users to support smaller initiatives themselves.

Providing simpler and more intuitive technology is a definite strategy that is reflected in our vendor's goals. This frees users of the platforms to focus on solving complex business problems using data - not on solving complex data integration or data quality problems.

For example, the off the shelf country rules from Trillium Software provide immediate value and save huge amounts of development effort when dealing with name and address data. A less obvious benefit is that the intellectual property packaged in these rules takes a lot of the guess work and trial and error out of developing your own rules - you can leverage and adapt the best practice rules very quickly to ensure a better fit to your data, secure in the knowledge that you are applying best practice principles.

Similarly, Expressor Software's semantic layer for data integration provides users with an easily maintained definition layer to manage data integration complexities. This allows data aware business people to easily convert and map data between “Account #” in system one and “Account ID” in system two.

In either case, business rules defined by business data stewards can be re-used, by other business users or by IT, and solutions can be deployed through traditional IT channels into robust production environments. This delivers the benefit of allowing IT to choose how involved they want or need to be.

This approach places a new set of challenges on the traditional IT support desk. Most vendors provide technical support where a system is not working as documented. This paradigm shift now requires application support, as the users may not be data quality or data integration experts. By offering users a support channel for “how to” type questions, these vendors are truly enabling the user - with more than just an easy to use, cost-effective tool.