My blogmate Michael Dortch was, as usual, right on top of things when he described BI as part of the great movement toward "IT 3.0," which brings people, tasks, and information together, rising well above the notion that BI is just about software and hardware. It's about knowledge and the sharing thereof.
Sure, we now have some data warehouses soaring into the 200-and-300-terabyte range. But, remember, they are "warehouses," and the real action is in how knowledge can be extracted from data stores of any size.
That's the message Jill Dyche conveyed to attendees at the recent meeting of the Data Management Association at their recent confab -- that "data management, data integration and data quality are bigger than your data warehouse now. The data warehouse and business intelligence environments were fantastic test beds for our nascent data management skills. But data issues are bigger than the data warehouse," Dyche said. "They're transcending reporting, and we have to get our arms around data -- both for analytics and operational purposes as well."
Jill outlined five major trends currently shaking the world of data management:
Data as a service" emerges. Here's one close to my heart -- "the rise of service-oriented architecture offers endless opportunities for "data people," Dyche said. Data can be service-enabled as shareable services just as applications are under an SOA scenario.
Master data management (MDM) is here to stay. While MDM is a confusing topic, it has long-term value as it will provide for the "sustained integration" of operational data, often in real time.
Business rules are back. Dyche said that though the concept has been around for 20 years, it's easier that ever to implement and deploy business rules. Now, organizations can implement business rules in a "once and done" way, rather than embedding them in individual applications.
Web 2.0 is coming. New Web-based technologies, such as wikis, blogs, tagging, social bookmarking and search technologies, are increasing data access and collaboration, Dyche said.
Data governance is ready for prime time. Consider processes for policy making and decision making around enterprise data as an asset, Dyche said. But there's no "cookie-cutter" template.
Leave a comment