Why Do We Care About Data Services?

The following was originally posted on ebizQ's Data at Your Service blog on Feb. 2, 2010.

For five years I've wanted a dashboard to bring together the key metrics in the company - I still don't have one. - CEO, Fortune 500 company

We started out moving a few files every night to keep our data in synch. Now, we have over 900 ftp batch jobs that run every night to move 20 terabytes of data. - Enterprise Architect, Investment Banking

It's become important to reconcile our business on a daily basis. The problem is that there's never an end of day when your business is run through Europe, the US, and Asia. - Enterprise Architect, Investment Banking

Our "overnight" batch job to load our data warehouse now finishes at 11:45am. Each month adds 30 minutes to that time. Data warehousing no longer works for us and we need to find an alternative quickly. - Data Architect, Fortune 100 company

We're trying to roll out at least 30 new operational business applications this year and each one of those needs a similar slice of the same data. We can't afford to reinvent how we manage data every time. - CIO, Fortune 500 company

These companies are in pain. Corporate IT is getting strained to be responsive to the business by using traditional approaches to data integration such as ETL and data replication. While those techniques are relevant for some environments, today's requirements in the business are moving quickly towards turning fragmented, silo'd, heterogeneous, and diverse piece of data into actionable information - real time - now - easily - and definitely not tomorrow or next week. This shift to increase the speed and agility of how we get our hands on information is through this contemporary type of data integration called Data Services.

In this blog, we're going to demystify Data Services and discuss how it's possible to immediately get the information necessary to figure out our business. That is, how to get today's actionable information without having to sponsor a new IT project.

Next week we'll dive in. If you have specific items you'd like me to discuss then please let me know.

Thanks,

John