Maximize Business Value through Right-Time Information Using Data Services

With continuous change increasingly driving businesses to become more agile, time is money and having access to critical business information at the right time is key to maintaining competitive advantage. This situation is becoming even more complicated as businesses are becoming increasingly impacted by powerful forces such as compliance, globalization, increasing competition, improved customer service needs, shrinking budgets and M&As. If we add to this already daunting list of challenges, the ongoing explosion and fragmentation of data all across the enterprise and beyond further complicates the situation. To support such dynamic environments, enterprises are increasingly pressurizing IT to deliver holistic and accurate business-critical information at the speed of the business.

In recent years, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as a leading technology for enabling a new generation of more flexible and cost-effective IT solutions. SOA promises to deliver business agility by breaking down barriers between silos of applications with flexible and reusable business services. However, if the data stuck inside silos of applications is bad, imagine the calamity when, through application and business process integration technology, the silos disappear and data from many different applications is commingled. SOA seems to have overlooked the data that feeds these processes and applications. Technologies such as enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise information integration (EII) have fallen short of providing flexibility in data latency and volumes.

This article introduces you to a data services platform as the most efficient approach for enabling business agility across the enterprise, through the delivery of right-time information, be it information delivered in batch, near real time or real time. With a data services platform you can enable scalable access, integration and right-time delivery of business-critical information to enterprise-wide composite applications. A data services platform maximizes business value using right-time information for driving competitive advantage, lowered risk and cost-effective project implementations.

Agility Requires the Availability of Right-Time Information

The availability of information at the right time directly impacts business agility, making it an extremely strategic enterprise asset. Businesses must continuously look into maximizing the strategic value of information by overcoming the roadblocks that stand in the way of leveraging timely information for business benefit.

Business concerns such as the ability to continuously differentiate through better decision-making, keeping costs under control by doing more with less, successfully executing M&As by rapidly on-boarding new systems, easily complying with changing laws through information-centric compliance reporting and delivering improved customer service by providing timely, accurate and consistent information, all point toward leveraging information as a strategic asset.

As business requirements are continuously changing to drive increased agility, IT departments are finding that they need to become more responsive than ever before. However, in trying to support business needs more efficiently, concerns abound as to how to efficiently deal with complex IT infrastructures involving diverse and distributed data sources. CIOs, IT managers and architects are often faced with addressing challenges such as:

Heterogeneity of data sources distributed across the enterprise and beyond,
Inconsistency of data and constantly changing data structures,
Poor data quality that is often difficult to measure or monitor,
Lack of agreement or visibility (single-view) into business-critical information assets, and
Little to no re-use of data integration logic and skills.

Data silos pose a real threat to businesses looking to efficiently leverage information when needed, as enterprise data is typically fragmented, inconsistent, inaccurate, lacks a single version of truth and is extremely complex to deal with.

Some of the typical integration issues and consequences impacting the availability of information at the speed of business that may exist in the enterprise include those listed in Figure 1.