InetSoft Webinar: Data From Multiple Source Systems
This is a continuation of the transcipt of a webinar hosted by InetSoft. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft, and he discusses the topic “The Advantages of Mobile Business Intelligence".
Mark Flaherty: So as use of mobile BI devices gravitates more towards employees out in the field, it's only natural that a significant part of the information needed by those employees is going to be customer related. So what orders does a customer place, what's their invoice history, what's their payment history, what trouble particularly could be raised and so on.It used to be the case that relevant information was poured into a single-data warehouse or data mart.
That makes it much more likely overall that employees are going to be able to find the data when they need it. Now instead of building and maintaining that data warehouse or that data marts, data is likely to be pulled from a number of different source systems and mashed up on the fly.
And to do that efficiently and refresh the data in a timely way, data integration tools can help. And again you can see that the best performing organizations are more likely to have integration available.
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One of the challenges with integration is when data is pulled from multiple source systems it can often be difficult to produce a clear picture because the source data is inconsistent or dirty. For example, imagine that I had a series of problems with my computer at home. I might log multiple trouble tickets via email, via chat, via phone calls for example, but “Mark” might sometime prerecord it as “Marc” and there are different ways to spell “Flaherty”, and there are certainly many very creative ways to mangle the spelling of “Metuchen” the town I live in.
In this way, through poor quality data entry, you can apparently end up with multiple Mark Flahertys living in “Metuchen”. Are they in reality just one person? Well most likely they are, so data cleansing software can help reconcile different spellings of names, addresses, and all kinds of variations on company names too. So data cleansing can be a very key part of creating a single version of the truth varies such as customer databases. Securities however we found best-in-class performance as well certainly exceeded other organizations too.
Now, one of the fundamental problems here is that mobility increases enterprise complexity and complexity increases risk. Aberdeen’s research has shown that organizations are actually keeping desktops and laptops for longer - about a three year replacement cycle and that’s growing - but the average replacement cycle for smartphone is 18 months and shrinking. So the constant churn in mobile device is going to make it hard for corporate IT to keep pace with imposing appropriate security and management policies on those mobile devices.
Now, part of the problem is that most of these devices (the exception really being the BlackBerry) are really conceived as consumer devices where rock solid security just isn’t requirement. So basic level of security we might expect is User Authentication which is shown by the top bars here, basic user name and password protection that’s used to authenticate a user getting access to corporate assets and just assume where we logged on when we sit down at the computer in the office.