Overview

Regardless of whether a business is focused on a parochial market or a global market, information is one of the most valuable enterprise assets. Information formalized and structured as granular and specific data is the foundation for tactical day-to-day operations. Alternatively, information that is aggregated, abstracted, grouped, and related supports analytical functions such as decision support and strategic planning. As most technology and business professionals know, the data that describe enterprise information are acquired from many sources, are stored in several databases, and are processed by numerous applications. In many enterprises, customer data are described by several different IDs and characteristics and used by many systems. Each system has its own definition and view of a customer, which introduces redundancy, disparate data definitions, and the inability to directly access, share, or reuse customer data. The problem of enterprise data disparity is not a new one, and is symptomatic of the following:

• Poor application and database design

• Tightly scoped and myopic application development strategies

• Budgeting and planning that is limited to specific system functionality (promoting autonomy)

• Acquisition and implementation of several packaged applications

• Acquisition of other businesses (along with their unique technology environments)

• Exchange of data with several external or collaborative trading partners

The fundamental problems are inability to access system-specific data and highly diverse and varied data structures. In order to identify customer relationships and leverage the information assets of the enterprise, each system needs to read, aggregate, decompose, and parse data from other systems. The most common solution...