The information management (IM) technology market is undergoing a revolution similar to the one in the business intelligence (BI) market. We define information management as the acquisition, organization, control and use of information to create and enhance business value. It is a necessary ingredient of successful BI implementations, and while some vendors such as IBM, Information Builders, Pentaho and SAP are in addition integrating their BI and IM offerings, each discipline involves different aspects of the use of information and will require it sometimes integrated and sometimes separate.
Some might consider information management as the “plumbing” behind BI. They take it for granted and only notice when it is missing. We have a more holistic view. Our recent benchmark research on business analytics shows that, for example, organizations struggle to collect all the data they need, with two-thirds of them stating they spend more time in data related activities than analytic ones.
Three key issues are driving our information research agenda in 2011:
1) Combining all the sources and types of data into an integrated information architecture.
2) Enabling organizations to manage and analyze larger volumes of information.
3) Providing accessibility to information throughout the organization.
We’ll be updating our information management benchmark research this year to see how these central issues are impacting IM overall. In addition we will focus on five technology innovations my colleague has identified as the business technology revolution in 2011: cloud computing, mobile technologies, social media, analytics of more types over more data and collaboration. Let me flesh out each of these a bit as they impact the evolution of IM.
As I pointed out in “Clouds Are Raining Corporate Data,” cloud computing is having an increasingly large influence over the IT landscape. It’s likely that, whether you realize it or not, corporate data exists and/or is migrating outside the walls of your organization. Cloud-based applications and services raise information management challenges that don’t necessarily exist in on-premises deployments. We’re investigating these issues now in our Business Data in the Cloud benchmark research program and where many new providers dealing with cloud data like Dell Boomi, Jitterbit and Snapdata play into the existing landscape of IBM, Informatica, iWay Software, Oracle, Pervasive and Syncsort to name just a few.
Mobile technologies are enabling organizations to deliver information to users when and where they need it. They are one of the forces driving cloud adoption as organizations look to make it easier to deliver applications to users regardless of their location. Mobile applications also are consuming and producing more location-related information and creating a need to manage this kind of data.
In the world of information management, social media has created entirely new challenges. Most social media data is unstructured text and is forcing organizations to embrace text analytics to deal with it, in many cases for the first time. The volumes of social media data and the speed with which it should be collected and analyzed also present new challenges. From an IM perspective, organizations must learn how to solve these challenges while enforcing appropriate data quality, data governance and life-cycle management policies.
Analytics present an additional set of IM challenges. The necessity of managing more data and different types of data has led to the adoption of large-scale technologies such as Hadoop. In research that is under way now we are researching the various ways of dealing with these huge data volumes and the role of Hadoop in that process. Predictive analytics also create IM challenges. Sampling, which is a key to producing unbiased predictive models, may or may not become less critical as database analytics grow in popularity. The models and the scores that such analytics produce are another form of data that must be managed and retained, often for compliance and auditing purposes. We’ll be studying these issues as part of predictive analytics benchmark research that will commence in the first part of 2011.
Collaboration provides a means to communicate and extend the processes of IM. It creates a new channel not only for delivery of information but also for input into the delivery process. Using collaboration tools such as Twitter, Chatter or Tibbr can help organizations use data and related information by involving more people. This wider audience collectively contains more knowledge about the underlying data and can also comment on its quality, which ultimately will lead to better data and more trust in it. Collaboration tools also provide a mechanism to link the workflows of information management with the constituents involved in the process.
Information management continues to evolve and grow, somewhat to my surprise as indicated in my recent assessment of Informatica. These changes present challenges for IT groups and lines of business alike. With our IM research agenda, we hope to provide useful information to both functions and help you navigate together through this changing landscape and achieve the goal of creating and enhancing business value.
Regards,
David Menninger – VP & Research Director
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 1, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Two Elephants Face Off: Hadoop and Oracle «
[…] I stopped into the Yahoo Hadoop Summit (Twitter: #HadoopSummit) to see how far the open source Hadoop technology has progressed. This open source community has been advancing for years with support from Internet titans like Yahoo, eBay and Facebook. Hadoop, as my colleague David Menninger has written, is now ready to play a large role as organizations try to cope with data on a large scale and solidify their information management agenda. […]
October 3, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Oracle Unveils the BI Appliance Called Exalytics «
[…] other market trend behind this convergence is cloud computing. We see cloud computing as one of five key technology innovations driving a revolution in information management. In this case, the combination of hardware and software available as a service in the cloud places […]
October 3, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Oracle Unveils the BI Appliance Called Exalytics «
[…] other market trend behind this convergence is cloud computing. We see cloud computing as one of five key technology innovations driving a revolution in information management. In this case, the combination of hardware and software available as a service in the cloud places […]
October 15, 2011 at 11:05 am
Oracle Big Data Appliance and Cloud Computing Stands on Shoulders of Giants «
[…] as a specialized form of computing. Ventana Research, in contrast, identifies the cloud as one of five key technologies influencing information management. Our benchmark research shows more than 40% of organizations […]
February 22, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Informatica Advances Business with Data Integration for Social Media «
[…] Even in this recessionary economy Informatica has been defying spending constraints. At its annual analyst summit (Twitter #INFAAnalyst) the company unveiled its growth strategies. Informatica has more than 4,500 customers for data integration and information management and now is turning its attention to the data in social media networks. Our firm has already identified social media as a key technology that businesses must embrace over the next decade to improve competitiveness or just keep up. Informatica already helps IT departments become better data stewards through a variety of methods and supports the executive mission of the CIO. My colleague David Menninger will comment on its vision and direction for its data integration portfolio; I will focus on its decision to use its technology for social media, which is part of a forthcoming product roadmap. Regarding the importance of embracing social media in this area, see David’s research and educational agenda in information management for 2011. […]
April 13, 2012 at 8:55 am
IBM Intensifies Information Management Again at IOD «
[…] The IBM information management product line is both broad and deep. The company continues to invest in integrating the various elements it has created or acquired over the years. IBM InfoSphere continues to advance as I indicated in my analysis from last year and advances the information management revolution that I outlined earlier this year. […]
April 16, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Pentaho 4 Unites Enterprise Business Intelligence and Data Integration «
[…] On the data integration side, Pentaho has extended the data sources it supports and allows more complicated schema such as multiple fact tables and operational data stores; this makes it easier to access data from a wider variety of systems. The new release has some data virtualization and federation capabilities that allow access to data without loading it into a data mart or data warehouse. Accessing virtualized data can be useful for prototyping situations or when small amounts of data may be needed from a remote or independent application. Among the new data sources, Pentaho BI 4.0 adds support for Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop 3.0 and EMC’s distribution for Hadoop , as well as Greenplum and Ingres Vectorwise. Pentaho also added support for some other “noSQL” data sources including MongoDB and Hbase. Earlier this year Jaspersoft, one of Pentaho’s open source BI competitors, announced similar moves to support more big-data sources. Adding these sources is important to companies such as Pentaho. As I have noted, we are living in an era of large-scale data and that is an important part of our information management research agenda. […]