VELOCITY

Accelerator

Data Integration Strategy

Evaluation Tool
DOCUMENT OWNER: John Schmidt
DATE CREATED: March 7, 2011
LAST UPDATED: June 13, 2012

© 2012 Informatica Corporation. All rights reserved. Velocity Methodology

DATA INTEGRATION STRATEGY EVALUATION TOOL

CHALLENGE
Integration is a challenging task, becoming ever more so as data silos proliferate and agility needs increase.
Fortunately, instead of having to rely on hand coding at the applications level to meet these requirements, integration
middleware technologies are available to automate significant work, add quality, accelerate time to solution and
reduce costs. Unfortunately, there is a dizzying array of tools and approaches, many of which promise a solution to
any and all integration challenges. The reality is that each approach, and technology, has specific capabilities for
which it is ideally suited for even though it could be used in a broader context at times.

The challenge is how to make consistent decisions about which technologies to use in which context. The challenge
is particularly evident in large organizations with distributed teams. Often the person or team might be tempted to
make a technology decision based on tools they are familiar with, even if a better tool that is the approval standard
exists in the organization. For example, a company may have selected Informatica PowerCenter as a corporate
standard and purchased an enterprise-wide license agreement, but a team that is only familiar with PL/SQL may
decide to create a hand-coded solution.

DESCRIPTION
The purpose of the Data Integration Strategy Evaluation Tool (DISET) is to help business analysts, project managers,
architects and developers to decide among four broad types of integration solutions (see detailed definitions below):

 Process Integration (PI)

 Data Integration (DI)
 Service Integration (SI)
 Other Integration (OI)

Each approach has unique strengths, and they are often used in combination for a given project. The intent of DISET
is to provide a simple 80/20-type decision making tool to let teams quickly select the right integration middleware
technology for each development project. The tool is not intended to support every situation and recognizes that
more detailed analysis may be needed in some cases. It is nonetheless helpful in determining the recommended
approach in 80% of cases and providing a basis for discussion in the other 20%.

The DISET worksheet must be customized for each organization, usually by the Integration Competency Center or
an architecture group, based on the standards that have been selected. The following worksheet is a working model
based on a specific example from one organization that uses a mix of Informatica and non-Informatica integration
technologies. To customize the accelerator, refer to page 5 of this document.

DISET Accelerator

USING THE DISET WORKSHEET

Each development project is different. Business purpose, data required and existing data state are but a few of the
considerations. Most of these elements are captured in the project's justification, high level design and detailed
design documents. DISET lets architects, designers, developers and project leaders leverage knowledge gained from
these project deliverables to identify and input up to 13 project considerations that impact a project's integration
approach. Synthesized from industry analysts, hands on project teams and independent research, these 13
considerations are grouped into three categories as follows:

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1. Business Considerations
2. Data Considerations
3. Protocol or Platform Considerations

For each consideration, the team member enters a subjective assessment by clicking on a radio button that most
closely matches his/her opinion. Generally, certain considerations are more important than others. The tool lets the
user weigh each characteristic from Critical to Non-Applicable (N/A) as appropriate. As assessments and weights are
entered, in effect completing the grid, the tool automatically scores the four types of integration approaches and
displays the results on a simple graph.

The integration approach with the largest positive score is generally the approach with the best fit and is the one that
should be used. The integration approach with the second largest positive score may be considered as an alternative
if (a) it is within 20% of the top score, and (b) if there are some mitigating circumstances which might make it a better
choice (such as availability of a particular type of resource). Integration approaches with a negative score should
never be considered for the given project.

PROCESS INTEGRATION (PI)

Process Integration (PI) is typically associated with long-running processes (i.e., where process state needs to be
maintained independent of the underlying application systems or where multiple data consumers or data providers
need to be orchestrated as part of a business transaction).

The primary platform that supports PI solutions is a process orchestration engine which provides an integration
infrastructure that includes Business Process Automation, Business Process Modeling, Business-to-Business
Communication, Enterprise Application Integration and Message Brokering. The Process Engine also includes an
extensive management and administration suite including many options for monitoring, analysis, tracing and auditing.

Although the Process Engine supports many input and output ports, the standard approach is to use web services as
both receive and send ports. This ensures a consistent method of interfacing across all integration points.

Process Integration is typically used to meet some or all of the following criteria:

 Integration of data from multiple sources is required.

 Integration is required to support a long-running process (from minutes to weeks).
 Integration processes have complex business rules.
 Integration is required to support a business process that spans across multiple applications, systems or data
sources which may be on disparate technologies or platforms.
 Integration involves industry standard protocols or adaptors built into B2B, such as HL7.
 Real-time or near real-time integration is required.
 Integration is required between applications or systems on different technology platforms, including with external
business partners.
 Message mapping, parsing, encryption through an adaptor pattern is required.
 Require the flexibility to change integration business rules frequently with minimal impact.
 Work from multiple processes and applications needs to be distributed across a global resource pool using
organization models and capability-based distribution.
 Workflow needs to be aggregated into individual work lists and routing must be dynamic and tuneable at runtime.

DATA INTEGRATION (DI)

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Data Integration (DI) is typically associated with accessing data and functions from disparate systems to create a
combined and consistent view of core information for use across the organization to improve business decisions and
operations.

The primary platform that supports DI is PowerCenter, Informatica’s Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tool. It is an
extensive and feature-rich data integration platform that is focused on data level integration. The platform provides a
full set of code objects to transform, clean, profile and move data between enterprise systems. The tool also has a
full maintenance suite for monitoring and scheduling data integration processes. Informatica also provides additional
tools to perform such things as data analysis, data integration impact assessment and mapping template creation.

As a mature and industrial storing product, Informatica includes a broad range of support for many common industry
applications and database platforms. The architecture is modular, flexible and designed to provide maximum reuse
and management while maintaining a high runtime performance.

DI is typically used to meet some or all of the following criteria:

 Integration of data from multiple sources is required.

 Whenever transforming data from operational data sources (OLTP) into the analytical reporting data source
(OLAP) or enterprise data warehouse.
 Integration does not need to be real-time.
 The integration requires a highly scalable solution that will be subjected to high loads.
 Significant work already exists in the Data Integration platform that can be reused for the integration needs.
 Standard rules for data masking is required for selected attributes across numerous applications and
databases—such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server and Teradata—and platforms, including Windows,
UNIX/Linux and z/OS.
 Audit and compliance reporting is required for sensitive information.
 Test and training data subsets are required across heterogeneous applications, databases and platforms
including automatic refresh of previously created data subsets with up-to-date transaction and reference data.
 Need to identify duplicate master data in any number of different formats and data sources.
 Increase the confidence in business-critical master data by creating the “best version of the truth” at the cell level
and sharing it across the enterprise.
 Improve auditing capabilities and compliance by tracking master data lineage and history using timelines
showing when the master data or hierarchies were created and modified to improve auditing capabilities and
compliance.
 Gain new insights into the business through an understanding of the relationships between business-critical
master data, such as grouping contacts into households, organizing channel partners into corporate hierarchies,
and classifying products and employees into taxonomies that can be easily manipulated.

SERVICE INTEGRATION (SI)

Service Integration (SI) is typically an interaction between a client system and a server system using standardized
interface definitions and standard protocol. The primary platform that supports SI is Informatica Data Services which
provides architecture for both data integration and data federation, creating a data virtualization layer that handles the
complexity of accessing underlying data sources while insulating them from change. It acts to access, combine and
federate data from one or multiple systems to deliver a consistent virtual view to the client systems.

SI is typically used to meet some or all of the following criteria:

 It is important for the provider logic to be abstracted from the consuming client system.

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 Integration is required between applications or systems on different technology platforms, including with external
business partners.
 When there is a need for integrated on-the-fly data transformation, data quality and data masking.
 Data provisioning logic will be reused by multiple consumers.
 When business functionality can be implemented as a simple, single atomic transaction.
 When maintaining conversation state beyond the business activity is not required.
 When provider availability is critical or decoupling from consumer is warranted.
 Real-time or near real-time integration is required.
 Require the flexibility to change integration business rules frequently with minimal impact.

OTHER INTEGRATION (OI)

Other Integration (OI) is an integration solution that is not based on any of the standard approaches (PI, DI or SI). It is
most applicable in situations when a special technology is required, such as database mirroring or if the solution
demands a direct connection with unique requirements. OI is typically used to meet some or all of the following
criteria:

 The source or target of the information exchange is a closed or legacy system which does not easily support
standard integration protocols or tools.
 The source or target application is a proprietary system that demands specific interface protocols, data
specifications or operability constraints that cannot be easily addressed with standard solutions.
 The information exchange involves an external entity which demands a custom integration protocol.
 A quick and simple tactical solution that has a short shelf-life or will not need to be changed.
 There is no opportunity or need for re-use or standardization.

CUSTOMIZING THE DISET WORKSHEET

While the DISET worksheet is useable as-is, it is necessary to customize it for each organization unless by chance
the organization has exactly the same technologies that are mentioned in the prior sections. The three most common
types of customizations are as follows:

DECISION DESCRIPTIONS
The labels of the 13 decision criteria and the descriptions of the two ends of the spectrum may be adjusted to be
more meaningful and intuitive. The changes may simply be wording changes to use terms or acronyms that are
commonly used in the organization. For example, “Time-to-Solution” could be changed to “Project Lead Time.”

Changes may be more fundamental, such as replacing one of the questions which may not be a significant decision
factor with a more highly differentiated one. For example, if Platform Support is not a differentiator for the four
strategies but architectural standards is, it is possible to replace it with “Architectural Alignment” and create
descriptions of the two ends of the spectrum.

INTERNAL CALCULATIONS
The key calculation in the worksheet is the “Opinion Multiplier” on the Internal Calculations tab which, when
combined with the question weight and the Assessment radio button, produces a score for each of the four
integration strategies. Positive scores reflect a moderate or strong alignment between the strategy and the decision
question assessment, while negative scores reflect a mild, moderate or strong non-alignment. If the Opinion Multiplier

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is set to zero, then the score is zero, which is also the case for any question where the Assessment radio button of
“Neutral” is selected. The Opinion Multiplier cells are highlighted in Yellow in the Excel worksheet and are the only
ones that should be changed. The relationship between the Opinion Multiplier, the Assessment Radio Button and the
resultant weight score is shown in the following table:

Opinion Assessment Radio Button

Multiplier -2 -1 0 1 2
-2 48 24 0 -24 -48
-1 24 24 0 -12 -24
0 0 0 0 0 0
1 -24 -12 0 24 24
2 -48 -24 0 24 48

WEIGHT

The weight step-up cell (also highlighted in Yellow) in the calculation tab can be adjust to exaggerate or down-play
the significance of the weight selection on the display tab. The default setting is .5. To down-play the weight
selection, reduce the step-up quantity to 0.1 or 0.2, or to zero to disable the weight factors entirely.

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