Publication: Data Management Review Column Title: Data Warehouse Delivery Author: Douglas Hackney Headline: When to Federate

Issue: May 2000 [callout: The federated BI architecture is the big tent ]

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In the past few months columns weve explored the reasons why a single, monolithic data warehouse (DW) architecture is incapable of supporting the reality of todays heterogeneous, speed driven market (past columns are available at www.egltd.com and www.dmreview.com). This month, well examine when it is appropriate or required to move to a federated BI architecture. As we have seen by the rapid growth and diversification of the business intelligence (BI) market, our current and future reality is driven by a wide panoply of business driven solutions focused on solving domain specific problems. There is little doubt that the BI market has outgrown its humble and relatively simple technologist and architecture roots. In fact, the market research company survey.com projects that the business intelligence market will be worth $148 billion dollars by 2003. In a market of this size, complexity and impact, a simple, monolithic architecture is desperately inadequate. This current and future BI market is built on the foundation of a modern BI infrastructure, consisting of a federated BI architecture accommodating all the components of a contemporary BI system: packaged/turnkey DWs and data marts (DM), packaged/turnkey analytical applications (AA), custom built DWs and DMs, custom built AAs, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP) tools, query and reporting (Q&R) tools, production reporting tools, data quality tools, extraction transformation and load (ETL) tools, system management tools, information delivery tools, enterprise information portals, reporting systems, knowledge management systems, database systems, etc. The federated BI architecture is the big tent that provides the foundation and environment to facilitate and enable business information flow, analysis and decision making in the typical organizations heterogeneous environment. Sites that are just embarking on the design and implementation of a BI system will most likely choose a federated architecture by default, as their system will be composed of a mixture of packaged and custom solutions. Sites that have started by attempting to develop a single, monolithic system are often highly stressed when faced with business driven scenarios that their old-think architecture is not optimized to support. You should design and develop a federated BI architecture when you are faced with the following scenarios: Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) The wave of M&A activity across all industry segments has presented the BI professional with a very challenging scenario. Often, teams that are happily humming along building their custom,

hub-and-spoke monolithic system awake one day to learn that they are the proud owners of a new company or two, along with their accompanying BI systems. If very rarely makes sense to flush a fully functioning data warehouse infrastructure down the toilet, so these teams are forced to adopt a federated BI architecture. Turnkey ERP DW(s) + Custom DW(s) Todays market is quickly moving from the build stage of evolution to a buy mode. Just as we all used to develop general ledger and order entry systems, but would never even consider it today, BI is moving from hand built, custom systems to packaged offerings. Teams that have a partially completed monolith data warehouse system (which means 99.99% of the systems on this planet) are often presented with a packaged data warehouse as an extension to the ERP or OLTP system that the business has just invested $20-40 million into. In this case, it is not conducive to career development to reject this turnkey system. Dont look a gift horse in the mouth as it were, and at a minimum consider it to be a wonderful way to extract data from the arcane innards of the ERP package. Multiple DW / DM Systems Organizations of any size, especially those that have been involved with data warehousing for more than a year or two, all have multiple DW / DM systems. A typical large scale site has between 10 and 40 data warehouse systems and countless scores of data mart systems of varying degrees of architecture. These sites must adopt a federated BI architecture to achieve any semblance of data integration across the multiple systems.

Turnkey analytical applications Turnkey analytical applications (AA) at extremely low price points ($5 50,000) are sweeping the marketplace. These systems are sold directly to the business users and are usually dumped on the doorstep of IT as soon as the purchaser is promoted or moves on to greener pastures. Most of these systems are non-architected and many are only marginally capable of being integrated at all. This scenario requires a federated BI architecture to accommodate these high-power, highimpact, politically sensitive solutions. Speed to market driven solutions There is nothing more important in todays business world than speed to market. It will trump architecture every time. In a survey of over 1,500 BI professionals Ive found one example of a business delaying an incremental income adding/margin affecting BI solution to allow for architecture. In order to be part of the solution, and to facilitate speed to market, you must accommodate the time requirements of the business in your federated BI architecture. Be ready for these inevitable scenarios and be ready to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem by laying the foundation of a federated BI architecture today. [end copy]