IBM WebSphere Information Analyzer and Data Quality Assessment

524 IBM WebSphere Information Analyzer and Data Quality Assessment

A.1 Introduction

Over the years, most organizations have made significant investments in

enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply

chain management packages in addition to their home grown applications. These

packages have resulted in larger amounts of data being captured about their

businesses. To turn all this data into consistent, timely, and accurate information

for decision-making requires an effective means of integrating information.

Statutory compliance requirements, such as Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley, place

additional demands for consistent, complete, and trustworthy information.

IBM Information Server addresses these critical information integration

requirements of consistent, complete, and trustworthy information with a

comprehensive, unified foundation for enterprise information architectures,

capable of scaling to meet any information volume requirement so that

companies can deliver business results faster and with higher quality results for

all the following initiatives:

򐂰 Business intelligence

IBM Information Server makes it easier to develop a unified view of the

business for better decisions. It helps you understand existing data sources,

cleanse, correct, and standardize information, and load analytical views that

can be reused throughout the enterprise.

򐂰 Master data management

IBM Information Server simplifies the development of authoritative master

data by showing where and how information is stored across source systems.

It also consolidates disparate data into a single, reliable record, cleanses and

standardizes information, removes duplicates, and links records together

across systems. This master record can be loaded into operational data

stores, data warehouses, or master data applications such as WebSphere

Customer Center and WebSphere Product Center. The record can also be

assembled, completely or partially, on demand.

򐂰 Infrastructure rationalization

IBM Information Server aids in reducing operating costs by showing

relationships between systems and by defining migration rules to consolidate

instances or move data from obsolete systems. Data cleansing and matching

ensure high-quality data in the new system.

򐂰 Business transformation

IBM Information Server can speed development and increase business agility

by providing reusable information services that can be plugged into

applications, business processes, and portals. These standards-based

Appendix A. IBM Information Server overview 525

information services are maintained centrally by information specialists but

are widely accessible throughout the enterprise.

򐂰 Risk and compliance

IBM Information Server helps improve visibility and data governance by

enabling complete, authoritative views of information with proof of lineage and

quality. These views can be made widely available and reusable as shared

services, while the rules inherent in them are maintained centrally.

IBM Information Server combines the technologies of key information integration

functions within the IBM Information Integration Solutions portfolio into a single

unified platform that enables companies to understand, cleanse, transform,

move, and deliver trustworthy and context-rich information as shown in

Figure A-1 on page 527.

IBM Information Server includes the following product modules:

򐂰 IBM WebSphere DataStage

It enables organizations to design data flows that extract information from

multiple source systems, transform it in ways that make it more valuable, and

then deliver it to one or more target databases or applications.

򐂰 IBM WebSphere QualityStage

Designed to help organizations understand and improve the overall quality of

their data assets, WebSphere QualityStage provides advanced features to

help investigate, repair, consolidate, and validate heterogeneous data within

an integration workflow.

򐂰 IBM WebSphere Federation Server

It enables applications to access and integrate diverse data and content

sources as though they were a single resource—regardless of where the

information resides—while retaining the autonomy and integrity of the

heterogeneous data and content sources. This enabling technology is

transparent, heterogeneous, and extensible, and provides high function and

high performance.

򐂰 IBM WebSphere Information Services Director

IBM Information Server provides a unified mechanism for publishing and

managing shared service-oriented architecture (SOA) services across data

quality, data transformation, and federation functions, allowing information

specialists to easily deploy services for any information integration task and

consistently manage them. This enables developers to take data integration

logic built using IBM Information Server and publish it as an

always on

service—in minutes. The common services also include the metadata

services, which provide standard service-oriented access and analysis of

metadata across the platform.