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Dealing with data silos? Meet your data strategy

May 23, 2008

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from the Cognos White Paper, A Broad Information Reach – The Gateway to Information Management. Download the PDF

Effective performance management is only possible when people throughout the enterprise have the information they need to make the better business decisions that enable them to meet operational goals.

But faced with an increasing number of data sources, exponential growth in data volume, data integration issues following mergers and acquisitions, compliance regulations, and the need to combine historical and real-time data for operational intelligence, the task of converting data to usable information can be daunting.

Breaking down the silos

To meet the needs of all users, and to overcome issues associated with integrating data for use with a variety of tools, it is often necessary to stage data in multiple places. As a result, data is in silos that are hard to get at and that store data in a variety of different formats that business can't readily use.

They also present usability challenges for people simply trying to get the information they need, and they increase complexity for IT.

To overcome these challenges, organizations must be able to get at their data reliably, they must be able to choose the best methods to source it, and they must have the flexibility needed to change approaches as their business demands change.

The new face of data

Increasingly, organizations are required to access data from more and more sources. Modern sources like Web services and XML are increasingly being adopted as systems move to the Web.

Other sources, such as WSDL, LDAP, and JDBC mean that, more than ever, organizations need a way to bring disparate, heterogeneous data sources together for effective BI.

Creating a common view

With multiple silos of data, multiple tools to access the data, and more kinds of data than ever before, the problems associated with making sense of it all are greater than ever.

The solution to these problems lies with common metadata that uses all of the data, no matter what its source, to provide a single business view that all users, in all roles across the organization, can use to manage the business.

Data from any source

Typically, the sources of data span multiple systems, platforms, and underlying technologies. Many of these have evolved over time, often without rigorous central management.

Business constraints have made it difficult or impossible to rationalize these into a single, cohesive data source.

And the time and money invested in these systems means it is seldom practical or cost effective to migrate the accumulated data into a single environment.

An enterprise strategy for managing data must allow access to data no matter what its source.

Typical enterprise data sources include various combinations of:

• All relational databases, including Oracle, SQL, IBM, Teradata, Sybase, and ODBC, as well as dimensionally aware sources like SAP BW.
• Widely deployed ERP systems, including SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.
• Enterprise data warehouses and marts, with both 3NF and star schemas.
• All widely used OLAP sources, including IBM Cognos PowerCubes, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, IBM DB2 OLAP Server, and Essbase.
• Modern data sources, such as XML, JDBC, LDAP and WSDL.
• Planning and budgeting data.
• "Satellite" data sources, including Excel files, Access files, flat files, and more.
• Mainframe sources, including VSAM, IMS, IDMS, Cobol copybooks, and others.
• Content management data, including FileNet, documentum, OpenSoft, and others.

Complete access to data, wherever it resides

To address the issues associated with integrating data for BI, Cognos delivers solutions built to provide the right mix of sourcing strategies.

Flexible data sourcing includes direct data access; extract, transform and load (ETL); and enterprise information integration (EII).

On top of this, Cognos provides a consistent user interface that promotes rapid adoption by users across the enterprise, not just within IT. The result is an effective enterprise BI platform.

To address the issues driving open data access, the Cognos open data access capability focuses squarely on providing easy and dependable access to data from any source, wherever it resides, with a common business model that provides the foundation for a single business view and for any BI need or capability.

By delivering data access capabilities within the framework of any approach – Direct, ETL, or EII – Cognos makes it possible to deliver information using:

• All of the data sources.
• Federated views of multiple data sources.
• Existing transaction systems, warehouses (relational and OLAP), flat, legacy or modern sources.

Open data access makes it possible to leverage existing data with minimal impact on existing systems.

Organizations in the process of re-architecting their approach to data access as part of an overall performance management initiative can access both existing and new systems, to take a phased-in approach to integrating data.

Direct access

Organizations that have a data integration strategy, tools, and metadata in place, and have online analytical processing (OLAP), relational OLAP (ROLAP), or other multi-dimensional data sources, can leverage the information in those existing data sources using Cognos.

Cognos delivers business intelligence and performance management capabilities that leverage all of these sources directly, and provides common metadata to bring together any or all of them. The result is a fully integrated set of BI capabilities.

Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL)

It's difficult to find a large enterprise that does not have a data warehouse in place. Getting data from many operational systems is something that happens every day. Data from multiple systems is integrated, cleansed, transformed, and aggregated to deliver a unified historical view that drives analysis.

Cognos has strong partnerships with data integration leaders, such as IBM and Informatica. This means that organizations with heavy investments in these tools can continue to use them. For example, IBM WebSphere® Data Integration Suite offers a comprehensive approach to metadata management.

Additionally, Cognos provides a full-featured BI data integration solution with benefits that include:

• The fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to integrate data.
• A powerful transformation engine that facilitates high performance transformations.
• A unique dimensional framework that automates the handling of common data warehousing issues, including slowly changing dimensions, late arriving facts, and surrogate key management, balancing, flattening and recursive hierarchy support with no coding required.
• Unicode support for global deployments.
• The ability to deliver and maintain dimensional warehouses and data marts with conformed dimensions.
• Metadata integration with IBM Cognos 8 BI, for fastest time to deliver any business intelligence capability.
• A complete and easy-to-use BI solution from one business intelligence vendor.
• End to end production scenario as you can publish Data Movement into IBM Cognos 8 BI.
• The ability to leverage investments in third-party tools: for example, the Cognos relationship with IBM includes support for DB2 UDB, Informix, Oracle, SQL Server, XML, email, CRM, and portal applications.

Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

As part of ensuring a platform for open data access, Cognos has built EII capabilities into Cognos 8 BI. This means organizations can connect to multiple disparate data sources in batch and real time, supporting the wide range of data strategies deployed today.

Cognos EII ensures fast performance, sophisticated session caching, and a single view of all data sources. Advanced caching options include event driven, scheduled, and manual refresh, as well as hybrid memory/disk usage.

In addition, Cognos has partnered with EII providers to ensure a full range of data access capabilities.

For example, the Cognos relationship with IBM provides enhanced support for WebSphere Information Integrator. WebSphere II integrates information from DB2 UDB, Informix, Oracle, SQL Server, XML, e-mail, CRM, and Portal applications.

It enables users to extend their data integration to mainframes, and to access content repositories, including those from FileNet, documentum, and DB2 Content Manager.

The EII component of the Cognos open data strategy ensures that existing IT resources can be leveraged, and that data from any source can be used to supply the information needed for the reporting and analytics that lead to better business decisions.

IBM Cognos PowerCubes® and Caching for Optimal Performance

To reduce performance impact on operational systems, networks, and queries, Cognos offers optimization of performance for end users via EII virtual caching, IBM Cognos PowerCubes, and in-memory caching.

This ensures that users generate optimized queries using a consistent approach that delivers the predictable results business users demand. It also ensures that administrators have minimal connections to manage, so they can leverage the unique features of individual RDBMS source systems.

Modeling and delivering the data

Of course, the benefits of a broad information reach are only realized when IT and data modelers can convert all of the data that the organization accumulates into information that makes sense to business people and can be used to make performance-enhancing decisions.

The Cognos 8 platform ensures that organizations reap the rewards of their broad information reach with data modeling and information delivery capabilities that include:

• A common business model for a consistent business view. Modelers tap into all of the data to build a single, multi-lingual model they can use to deliver separate packages of secure information to individuals and groups across the enterprise.
• Assured data quality. Through a longstanding relationship with Informatica, Cognos ensures that data is cleansed, and that IT and business users can work together to resolve data quality issues and monitor data quality metrics.
• A flexible modeling environment. Modelers can work separately and combine their results. Models are multi-tiered and feature metadata traceability, impact analysis, and remapping capabilities, so that models can evolve efficiently with changing business needs.

Summary

Delivering the right information to the right users at the right time, in a format that is usable and fosters high productivity, demands broad access to the right data.

Cognos delivers an information reach that includes the ability to access any data source or combination of data sources, develop common metadata across them for a common business view, and then leverage that view to securely deliver any business intelligence capability to any user.

And it provides the tools needed to easily maintain and revise the corporate view as new data sources emerge and as business needs evolve. The result is a platform for effectively managing performance and driving corporate success.

Find Out More Cognos Performance 2008: Sign up now! More about the Cognos 8 platform for performance management

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