Those who recast their careers in the data integration space typically get there by accident.  They get tasked to create a data integration strategy within their organization, or they are tossed some data integration technology.  Once they run with it, another data integration subject matter expert is born. The path to develop your “mad data [...]

You may have noticed the words “Data Governance” cropping up every now and then in articles about BI, and particularly articles about MDM. But what is it? And Who cares? We have gone through decade after decade of IT without anyone entertaining the notion that data should be governed in some way, never mind what [...]

For too many years, people working with data have used this trite – and truly inexact — definition of metadata: metadata is data about data. It’s short, it’s sweet and it sounds clever. But it doesn’t help anyone understand Metadata and what makes it distinct from the data itself. It’s quite likely that this inexactness [...]

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 [...]

In my last posting I discussed the data centric and process centric view of IT. Let’s now take this a little further and put these two views of the IT world on an equal footing. If we do that, then just as there is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), there also needs to be an [...]