Operational Integration Competing With Analytical Integration Projects

Are you robbing your business intelligence work for operational data integration?

Operational data integration is the integration work you do for consolidation, collocation, migration, upgrading or synchronization of operational databases, and the need for this type of work is growing fast…so fast, some companies are borrowing data-integration specialists from the data warehouse teams to do operational data integration. And that’s leaving projects that require analytical data integration in a lurch, which, in turn is hurting business intelligence projects, according to the TDWI.

Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul. I’m not sure why companies would choose to do this, given that BI software is expected to be among the top technology spending priorities for 2009, according to Gartner. And it’s not cheap – the software alone can cost anywhere from from $150,000 to $300,000 for a large company.

Integration is critical for success with business intelligence, too. In fact, lack of integration is one of the five points of failure for solutions, according to a recent eCommerce Times article, which notes that inadequate integration support means your BI tools are providing only “a partial view of the needed data.”

Despite this supposed focus on BI, recent research from Oracle found most enterprises fail when it comes to sharing and using information from business intelligence tools.

The same research found that companies are failing to feed information from operational performance into their planning systems, as well:

Businesses are missing a trick in failing to feed information on operational performance back into financial planning and reporting functions. Bringing these two disciplines closer together gives businesses much more agility to respond effectively to emerging challenges.

Meanwhile, some companies rush to the other extreme, building unneeded teams and infrastructure to support operational data integration.

How can smart companies balance the demands of both operational and analytical data integration?

Phil Russom, the senior manager for TDWI Research, is a good pace to start.  Russom is one of my favorite people to interview I find he’s extremely knowledgeable about business intelligence, data warehousing, and all the related data  issues. As he should be: He’s been around for decades, and much of that time he’s worked as an analyst for firms such as Forrester, Giga, the Hurwitz Group and Intelligent Enterprise Magazine, according to his LinkedIn profile.

On top of all that, he custom designs furniture, so why wouldn’t you want to listen to what this man has to say?