Credit Crunch, Security Compliance or Service Oriented Architecture

These data consumers include:

• The Business Intelligence Data Consumer can drill down into all the data produced by our ecosystem of applications to give us information on for example our top 20% of customers and how much they’ve ordered
• The Spreadsheet Data Consumer – can allow us to take the data and produce sophisticated what if analyses
• The Portal Data Consumer – can enable us to have an on-line delivery verification system based on what products are ordered
• The Data Dashboard Data Consumer – could quickly give us graphical representations of market segments by product or market segments by location at a more high level view than our Business Intelligence Data Consumer

Decoupling of Data

The Bottom Row of Diagram 1 represents a variety of data sources. For example the van delivery data source could be from an access database, inventory management data source could be in Oracle database format and we may have SAP data source from our invoicing application.

Note the Data Layer above these data sources. This Data Layer is important as it wraps data in a format of your choice.  Essentially the layer decouples data from their data sources to allow the data consumers to understand the various data sources.

Lower Data Management Costs

As an IT consultant, I get to manage and work with many different projects. All of them have some data stored in some form and often require either internal database programmers or are outsourced (ie to the software vendor) for customisation as no two companies ever seem to be the same.  This can be incredibly costly if you have five or six different silos of information that require

a. Individual customisation. 

b. A single perspective view

c. Integration of some components

d. The same information to be input into each database (Eg employee information would need to be input into at least HR database, Network directory database, email database and the payroll database)