Business users possess the knowledge of how data is used for certain business processes — such business users are invaluable for examining business data: first, to determine its value in context, and second, to understand how it contributes to intelligence being gathered for the enterprise. Until data is understood in relationships to various systems and [...]

“Data” is a term that has attached itself to a growing number of words in the business intelligence space. Data management, database, data warehouse, data mining, just to name a few. The list is nearly inexhaustible. As pervasive as the term is, however, few can have a good answer to the seemingly simple question: What [...]

The heart of an IOA is what we have chosen to call the middleware components. This set of software components connects the BI applications to the various BI data sources in a reliable way, delivering data to the applications in a timely manner. This is not a trivial task to achieve, requiring more than just [...]

Many enterprises are evolving to work at faster paces, driven by quickly changing markets, competitive demands and the proliferation of real-time services in the cloud. To support the right-time data needs of such enterprises, data integration processes are also accelerating for certain business needs. Business processes that focus on meeting operational or functional requirements in [...]

When you think about it, nearly all the data used by BI applications comes from elsewhere. This is why the Information Oriented Architecture specifically highlights connections to operational systems and to the cloud. The cloud doesn’t just imply corporate applications running in the cloud or corporate data residing in the cloud It also means data [...]