Consultants and experts in the BI field use the terms “data governance” and “data integration” to talk about how to approach the kinds of problems we’ve been discussing in this section of the material. These fundamental concepts lie at the heart of the “integrated and coordinated” part of the definition we gave earlier for BI as a whole. Previously, we introduced data governance in two articles. This article introduces the concept of data integration.
Whereas data governance (in my opinion, at least) is really a people concept that requires a human touch to manage properly, data integration is more a technical concept for implementing the parts of data governance policy that call for BI to reflect the business as a whole. Put another way, data integration is the activity of pulling together data from systems all over the business and tying it all together so it says something meaningful about the whole business.
If you’re just starting your own business, or you’re in a business unit of a company where there is little or no data governance in place, data integration is simply not a high priority. You may only have one set of data to work with, as was the case in “'Real' World Story #1.” In that case the output was meant strictly for internal consumption by the sales force. In the case of the fictional specialty retail store we discussed earlier, the only data available in the beginning might be point of sale data plus some cost data.
But as the business grows in size and data accumulate in more and different places, data integration becomes more and more important. As our specialty retail store develops, sales are collected both in the store and online. Also, there may now be shipping data sitting in a completely different place. Without some way of tying all of this together it becomes difficult to impossible to get the big picture of how the business is doing. So whether you need it or not to begin with, it’s never too early to start thinking about and planning for data integration in your business.
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