Business Intelligence Lowdown: Enterprise Information Integration

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February 19, 2006

Enterprise Information Integration

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) is being touted as the solution to the ills __ regulatory compliance, real-time business intelligence (BI), and the daunting task of converging structured and unstructured information __ plaguing the business world. EII is defined as the integration of data from multiple systems into a unified, consistent and accurate representation geared toward the viewing and manipulation of the data. It integrates the information assets of an enterprise by providing access to diverse information sources from a variety of disparate siloes of information.

Probably this definition of EII reminds you of traditional information integration techniques like ETL-oriented data warehousing and customer data integration. The difference lies in the fact that EII accesses, instead of moving the information. EII provides a consolidated view of data through virtualization techniques that hide the combined query processing system that pulls data from various sources, while ETL moves data to data repositories and data marts. EII focuses on less data movement and transformation while combining disparate definitions of data elements using strong global query optimization. EII is not a replacement for data warehousing; it complements the technology by bringing in data from minor or non-standard sources, and presenting it to the client on demand.

Other pivotal elements of EII include metadata management and robust data modeling. Metadata supports data reusability by creating and maintaining the logic and interfaces needed to preserve virtual views of customers and products. EII tools help maintain and enhance security of metadata and data in diverse sources. The technology is vital in providing an integrated platform that blends data access standards with data about the sources and the information needs.

In a nutshell, EII aims at providing a unified, on-demand view of data by creating access to multiple and different sources of data securely and efficiently.

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February 19, 2006 in Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing | Permalink