For Business Process Professionals

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	October 2, 2008 (updated November 10, 2008) Federation: Sharpen Your Focus On Vast Constellations Of Data by James G. Kobielus with Rob Karel, Boris Evelson, Norman Nicolson

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Executive Summary

Scattered business information permeates many enterprises. This disunited data often conforms to various schemas and formats, resides in sundry databases and applications, and falls under the purview of myriad owners, administrators, and business domains. Such a fragmented state of affairs can prove frustrating for information workers who require a single, unified view of disparate operational data within their reports, dashboards, query tools, and other business intelligence (BI) applications. The most common approach for integrating heterogeneous data into a single, unified BI view is enterprise data warehousing (EDW), which has constraints that often limit its applicability in highly decentralized and agile environments. When users simply need unified, near-real-time, on-demand access to data that originates in many source applications, data federation is an attractive alternative alternative that is part of an overall information-as-a-service (IaaS) strategy. Information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals should also consider data federation a complementary approach that can extend and enrich their current EDW environment.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• A Unified View Of Disparate Data Is Key To Business Optimization
• EDW Is The Dominant Single-View Approach, But It Has Its Limitations
• Data Federation Supplements EDW In Decentralized Environments
• Federation Deployments Vary Widely In Practice

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Use Federation For Single-View Scenarios Hamstrung By EDW Constraints

WHAT IT MEANS

• View Federation As Strategic BI Architecture, Not Simply As An EDW Stopgap
• Supplemental Material
• Related Research Documents

This is an excerpt

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