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.

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.

As data management and integration continue to evolve rapidly, storing all your data in one place, such as a data warehouse, is no longer scalable. In the very near future, data will need to be distributed and available for several technological solutions. With this practical book, you’ll learnhow to migrate your enterprise from a complex and tightly coupled data landscape to a more flexible architecture ready for the modern world of data consumption. Executives, data architects, analytics teams, and compliance and governance staff will learn how to build a modern scalable data landscape using the Scaled Architecture, which you can introduce incrementally without a large upfront investment. Author Piethein Strengholt provides blueprints, principles, observations, best practices, and patterns to get you up to speed. Examine data management trends, including technological developments, regulatory requirements, and privacy concerns Go deep into the Scaled Architecture and learn how the pieces fit together Explore data governance and data security, master data management, self-service data marketplaces, and the importance of metadata

"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.

Building upon his earlier book that detailed agile data warehousing programming techniques for the Scrum master, Ralph's latest work illustrates the agile interpretations of the remaining software engineering disciplines: - Requirements management benefits from streamlined templates that not only define projects quickly, but ensure nothing essential is overlooked. - Data engineering receives two new "hyper modeling" techniques, yielding data warehouses that can be easily adapted when requirements change without having to invest in ruinously expensive data-conversion programs. - Quality assurance advances with not only a stereoscopic top-down and bottom-up planning method, but also the incorporation of the latest in automated test engines. Use this step-by-step guide to deepen your own application development skills through self-study, show your teammates the world's fastest and most reliable techniques for creating business intelligence systems, or ensure that the IT department working for you is building your next decision support system the right way. - Learn how to quickly define scope and architecture before programming starts - Includes techniques of process and data engineering that enable iterative and incremental delivery - Demonstrates how to plan and execute quality assurance plans and includes a guide to continuous integration and automated regression testing - Presents program management strategies for coordinating multiple agile data mart projects so that over time an enterprise data warehouse emerges - Use the provided 120-day road map to establish a robust, agile data warehousing program

You have to make sense of enormous amounts of data, and while the notion of "agile data warehousing might sound tricky, it can yield as much as a 3-to-1 speed advantage while cutting project costs in half. Bring this highly effective technique to your organization with the wisdom of agile data warehousing expert Ralph Hughes. Agile Data Warehousing Project Management will give you a thorough introduction to the method as you would practice it in the project room to build a serious "data mart. Regardless of where you are today, this step-by-step implementation guide will prepare you to join or even lead a team in visualizing, building, and validating a single component to an enterprise data warehouse. - Provides a thorough grounding on the mechanics of Scrum as well as practical advice on keeping your team on track - Includes strategies for getting accurate and actionable requirements from a team's business partner - Revolutionary estimating techniques that make forecasting labor far more understandable and accurate - Demonstrates a blends of Agile methods to simplify team management and synchronize inputs across IT specialties - Enables you and your teams to start simple and progress steadily to world-class performance levels

Use Lean Techniques to Integrate Enterprise Systems Faster, with Far Less Cost and Risk By some estimates, 40 percent of IT budgets are devoted to integration. However, most organizations still attack integration on a project-by-project basis, causing unnecessary expense, waste, risk, and delay. They struggle with integration “hairballs”: complex point-to-point information exchanges that are expensive to maintain, difficult to change, and unpredictable in operation. The solution is Lean Integration. This book demonstrates how to use proven “lean” techniques to take control over the entire integration process. John Schmidt and David Lyle show how to establish “integration factories” that leverage the powerful benefits of repeatability and continuous improvement across every integration project you undertake. Drawing on their immense experience, Schmidt and Lyle bring together best practices; solid management principles; and specific, measurable actions for streamlining integration development and maintenance. Whether you’re an IT manager, project leader, architect, analyst, or developer, this book will help you systematically improve the way you integrate—adding value that is both substantial and sustainable. Coverage includes Treating integration as a business strategy and implementing management disciplines that systematically address its people, process, policy, and technology dimensions Providing maximum business flexibility and supporting rapid change without compromising stability, quality, control, or efficiency Applying improvements incrementally without “Boiling the Ocean” Automating processes so you can deliver IT solutions faster–while avoiding the pitfalls of automation Building in both data and integration quality up front, rather than inspecting quality in later More than a dozen in-depth case studies that show how real organizations are applying Lean Integration practices and the lessons they’ve learned Visit integrationfactory.com for additional resources, including more case studies, best practices, templates, software demos, and reference links, plus a direct connection to lean integration practitioners worldwide.