Find the right people with the right skills. This book clarifies best practices for creating high-functioning data integration teams, enabling you to understand the skills and requirements, documents, and solutions for planning, designing, and monitoring both one-time migration and daily integration systems. The growth of data is exploding. With multiple sources of information constantly arriving across enterprise systems, combining these systems into a single, cohesive, and documentable unit has become more important than ever. But the approach toward integration is much different than in other software disciplines, requiring the ability to code, collaborate, and disentangle complex business rules into a scalable model. Data migrations and integrations can be complicated. In many cases, project teams save the actual migration for the last weekend of the project, and any issues can lead to missed deadlines or, at worst, corrupted data that needs to be reconciled post-deployment. This book details how to plan strategically to avoid these last-minute risks as well as how to build the right solutions for future integration projects. What You Will Learn Understand the “language” of integrations and how they relate in terms of priority and ownershipCreate valuable documents that lead your team from discovery to deploymentResearch the most important integration tools in the market todayMonitor your error logs and see how the output increases the cycle of continuous improvementMarket across the enterprise to provide valuable integration solutions Who This Book Is For The executive and integration team leaders who are building the corresponding practice. It is also for integration architects, developers, and business analysts who need additional familiarity with ETL tools, integration processes, and associated project deliverables.

"Customers are the heart of any business. But we can't succeed if we develop only one talk addressed to the 'average customer.' Instead we must know each customer and build our individual engagements with that knowledge. If Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is going to work, it calls for skills in Customer Data Integration (CDI). This is the best book that I have seen on the subject. Jill Dyché is to be complimented for her thoroughness in interviewing executives and presenting CDI." -Philip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University "In this world of killer competition, hanging on to existing customers is critical to survival. Jill Dyché's new book makes that job a lot easier than it has been." -Jack Trout, author, Differentiate or Die "Jill and Evan have not only written the definitive work on Customer Data Integration, they've made the business case for it. This book offers sound advice to business people in search of innovative ways to bring data together about customers-their most important asset-while at the same time giving IT some practical tips for implementing CDI and MDM the right way." -Wayne Eckerson, The Data Warehousing Institute author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business Whatever business you're in, you're ultimately in the customer business. No matter what your product, customers pay the bills. But the strategic importance of customer relationships hasn't brought companies much closer to a single, authoritative view of their customers. Written from both business and technicalperspectives, Customer Data Integration shows companies how to deliver an accurate, holistic, and long-term understanding of their customers through CDI.

Between the high-level concepts of business intelligence and the nitty-gritty instructions for using vendors’ tools lies the essential, yet poorly-understood layer of architecture, design and process. Without this knowledge, Big Data is belittled – projects flounder, are late and go over budget. Business Intelligence Guidebook: From Data Integration to Analytics shines a bright light on an often neglected topic, arming you with the knowledge you need to design rock-solid business intelligence and data integration processes. Practicing consultant and adjunct BI professor Rick Sherman takes the guesswork out of creating systems that are cost-effective, reusable and essential for transforming raw data into valuable information for business decision-makers. After reading this book, you will be able to design the overall architecture for functioning business intelligence systems with the supporting data warehousing and data-integration applications. You will have the information you need to get a project launched, developed, managed and delivered on time and on budget – turning the deluge of data into actionable information that fuels business knowledge. Finally, you’ll give your career a boost by demonstrating an essential knowledge that puts corporate BI projects on a fast-track to success. Provides practical guidelines for building successful BI, DW and data integration solutions. Explains underlying BI, DW and data integration design, architecture and processes in clear, accessible language. Includes the complete project development lifecycle that can be applied at large enterprises as well as at small to medium-sized businesses Describes best practices and pragmatic approaches so readers can put them into action. Companion website includes templates and examples, further discussion of key topics, instructor materials, and references to trusted industry sources.

How do you approach answering queries when your data is stored in multiple databases that were designed independently by different people? This is first comprehensive book on data integration and is written by three of the most respected experts in the field. This book provides an extensive introduction to the theory and concepts underlying today's data integration techniques, with detailed, instruction for their application using concrete examples throughout to explain the concepts. Data integration is the problem of answering queries that span multiple data sources (e.g., databases, web pages). Data integration problems surface in multiple contexts, including enterprise information integration, query processing on the Web, coordination between government agencies and collaboration between scientists. In some cases, data integration is the key bottleneck to making progress in a field. The authors provide a working knowledge of data integration concepts and techniques, giving you the tools you need to develop a complete and concise package of algorithms and applications.

What is agile data warehousing? -- Iterative development in a nutshell -- Streamlining project management -- Authoring better user stories -- Deriving initial project backlogs -- Developer stories for data integration -- Estimating and segmenting projects -- Adapting agile for data warehousing -- Starting and scaling agile data warehousing.

How much are sponsors, customers, partners, stakeholders involved in Data Integration? In other words, what are the risks, if Data Integration does not deliver successfully? What is xml-based data integration? Why are Data Integration skills important? What other organizational variables, such as reward systems or communication systems, affect the performance of this Data Integration process? What other areas of the organization might benefit from the Data Integration team's improvements, knowledge, and learning? Defining, designing, creating, and implementing a process to solve a business challenge or meet a business objective is the most valuable role... In EVERY company, organization and department. Unless you are talking a one-time, single-use project within a business, there should be a process. Whether that process is managed and implemented by humans, AI, or a combination of the two, it needs to be designed by someone with a complex enough perspective to ask the right questions. Someone capable of asking the right questions and step back and say, 'What are we really trying to accomplish here? And is there a different way to look at it?' For more than twenty years, The Art of Service's Self-Assessments empower people who can do just that - whether their title is marketer, entrepreneur, manager, salesperson, consultant, business process manager, executive assistant, IT Manager, CxO etc... - they are the people who rule the future. They are people who watch the process as it happens, and ask the right questions to make the process work better. This book is for managers, advisors, consultants, specialists, professionals and anyone interested in Data Integration assessment. Featuring 627 new and updated case-based questions, organized into seven core areas of process design, this Self-Assessment will help you identify areas in which Data Integration improvements can be made. In using the questions you will be better able to: - diagnose Data Integration projects, initiatives, organizations, businesses and processes using accepted diagnostic standards and practices - implement evidence-based best practice strategies aligned with overall goals - integrate recent advances in Data Integration and process design strategies into practice according to best practice guidelines Using a Self-Assessment tool known as the Data Integration Scorecard, you will develop a clear picture of which Data Integration areas need attention. Included with your purchase of the book is the Data Integration Self-Assessment downloadable resource, containing all 627 questions and Self-Assessment areas of this book. This enables ease of (re-)use and enables you to import the questions in your preferred Management or Survey Tool. Access instructions can be found in the book. You are free to use the Self-Assessment contents in your presentations and materials for customers without asking us - we are here to help. This Self-Assessment has been approved by The Art of Service as part of a lifelong learning and Self-Assessment program and as a component of maintenance of certification. Optional other Self-Assessments are available. For more information, visit http://theartofservice.com

. The goal of this book is to present a simple yet thorough resource that describes the challenges of business data integration and the solutions to these challenges such as schema integration, illustrated through an Operational Data Store (ODS) case study.