Enterprise information integration (EII) is now a market separate from enterprise application integration (EAI) and extract, transform and load (ETL) solutions, (source Aberdeen Group).
The reasons for this are chiefly threefold :-
- Companies now recognize a distinct need to integrate information across the enterprise because the overall pool of proprietary enterprise information - as distinct from information associated with specific packaged applications, Web databases, or data mining sources - is now a key e-business differentiator. The ability to leverage information from a wide variety of storage types, environments, applications, databases, and files via enterprise portals allows enterprises to deliver major value-add simultaneously to employees, partners, and customers.
- Secondly, Companies are now at a critical stage in linking back-end applications and data to their front-end Web sites. Three years of fragmented efforts to link key applications one by one, followed by a proliferation of enterprise portals that criss-cross various back-end data sources, have left companies with unnecessarily complex and costly e-business architectures. The key to cutting administrative and new application development costs is to implement a common software infrastructure architecture - and EII infrastructure lies at the core of such an architecture.
- Finally, the requirements of e-business are a superset of the requirements of traditional information processing. A narrow definition of data integration as being concerned only with integrating information within a company must change to encompass EII’s integration of information between companies as well.
DIFFERENTIATING EII :
EII is a new technology and should be carefully distinguished from EAI and ETL solutions.
An ETL engine (sometimes called a “data integration” solution) allows multiple streams of data to be converted to a common data warehouse data format and be loaded into the warehouse “in bulk” or in short “bursts.” However, it does not deliver that data to external targets, such as an enterprise portal; it does not make the source data appear as one database; and it does not typically emphasize transactional access to the data.
An EAI solution passes data among multiple packaged applications. It does not deliver that data to other external targets, such as a Web site or enterprise portal, and it often operates at the level-of-business processes rather than at the data level. (See EII v EAI).
THE BENEFITS OF EII :
Progressive Companies now recognise that “cost savings” alone don’t guarantee success. A clear “competitive advantage” is essential in staying ahead of the game! To create and maintain competitive advantage, enterprises are now connecting their back-end order processing (B-to-C) and supply chain (B-to-B) applications to Web sites and, in some cases, with other companies’ Web sites or with e-marketplaces. We are also witnessing a clear move towards real-time delivery of information through Business Intelligence, Enterprise Portals and Digital Dashboards. This includes delivery to a much wider population of information consumers across and beyond the Enterprise. EII provides a number of benefits in striving to achieve competitive advantage :-
- To fully leverage the connections between information from different applications and databases, an enterprise needs an EII infrastructure to aggregate data and coordinate transactions across back-end data sources. At its most powerful, EII lets all back-end information be seen as if it came from one comprehensive, global database.
- Within an organization, EII can tie the company together and ensure faster, better decision-making.
- Along with these competitive advantages come built-in cost savings :-
- IT cost savings from simplifying the administration of the database/application connections
- Resultant key administrative costs.
- significant time savings in both development and upgrading data-intensive applications that cross data sources.
- The business benefits of EII increase exponentially with successive integration of each related application and database. The connections between each additional information source and all the others have typically not been examined in most enterprises, and these connections allow employee empowerment, greater insights into competitive advantage, more rapid response to customer inquiries and orders, and more effective integration with the databases of supply chain partners.
- Finally, a very important point; integrating informational applications, or e-information, from existing databases is not easy. Hence, the competitive advantage derived from such a strategy is significantly more durable and differentiation is easier.
EII delivers an immediate impact to the bottom line by eliminating the need for “information intermediaries” that stand between the individual employee and the information that he or she needs.
But the benefits of EII do not end with the bottom line. For example, employee-productivity solutions based on EII provide additional information to employees, such as company policies and standards or information about the company’s products and they can deliver critical cross-database information in a just-in-time fashion. This information, in turn, can give users the ability to make higher quality, more rapid decisions because they can base their decision making on higher quality data that is more up-to-date. Visualization and personalization of the information through, for example a digital dashboard, can improve the employee’s comprehension of the data. |
