WHITE PAPER
DATA INTEGRATION:Creating a Trustworthy Data Foundation for Business Intelligence
CONTENTS Executive Summary 1 Executive Summary 2 Introduction To make sound decisions and comply with governmental reporting 3 Why Is Data Integration So Important? requirements, an organization must first establish a solid data foundation. 4 A pproaches for Integrating Data This foundation must combine historical data with current values from 7 Warning Signs: Does Your operational systems in order to provide a single version of the truth that can Organization Suffer from be then used to identify trends and predict future outcomes. Data integration Poor Data? 9 The Benefits of Data Integration technology is the key to consolidating this data and delivering an information 14 Approaches to Implementing a infrastructure that will meet strategic business intelligence (BI) initiatives Data Integration Solution and tactical and governmental reporting requirements. Data integration is 2 0 C onclusion the enabling technology for providing trustworthy information, enhancing IT 21 Appendix and end-user productivity, and helping organizations achieve and maintain a 23 About MAS Strategies24 About Business Objects, competitive edge. Data integration enables mid-size and large organizations an SAP company to effectively and efficiently leverage their data resources in order to satisfy their analysis and reporting requirements. While a homegrown data integration effort frequently yields a quick and dirty solution that may initially appear inexpensive, any upfront savings are often soon lost as demands on resources and personnel change. Vendor-supported packaged solutions, on the other hand, have withstood the test of time. Since they include capabilities such as metadata integration, ongoing updates and maintenance, access to a wider variety of data sources and types, and design and debugging options rarely offered by in-house solutions, they serve to increase the productivity of the IT organization. This is an important advantage as few organizations have unlimited resources and most are under constant pressure to do more with less. Additionally, most homegrown data integration solutions are almost never integrated with an organization's BI tools. Such integration is, however, available with commercial offerings either by adherence to industry standards and/or through integration with the BI tools in the data integration vendor's total product portfolio. This white paper from Business Objects, an SAP company, discusses the importance of data integration and help you identify the key challenges of integrating data. It also provides you with an overview of data warehousing and its variations, as well as summarizes the benefits and approaches to integrating data.
Author: MAS StrategiesContributors: M aryLouise Meckler, David Nguyen, Philip OnAudience: Report developers, data warehouse managers, IT director, CIOIntroduction
Imagine you work with one of your organization's mission-critical operational systems. Your organization considers you the go-to person for any query or reporting request associated with this system.What if your CEO were to ask you to modify one of your year-end reports to compare this year's numbers to those from the two previous years? Unfortunately, the operational system you are reporting off of only stores current-year detail records and prior-year summary balances. The summary balances from two years ago were purged from the system at the beginning of this year. When you try to explain this to the CEO, all you hear is, "So how long will it take to find the lost data?"Your medium-sized company is publicly held and under the Sarbanes-Oxley act your CEO and CFO must certify the accuracy of its financial statements based on data from several internal systems and spreadsheets. In a recent conversation, the CFO asked you to confirm the roll-ups in these reports were trustworthy; that they were timely, auditable, and not based on "adding apples to oranges."
Can you reference historical values? Can you comply with the reporting requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley? Is important data trapped inside proprietary applications? Can you combine data from several departmental systems?
In addition to the requests from the CEO and CFO, you receive another request to produce a report from a commercial enterprise application software package your company has rece... [download for more]
