Data integration is a critical part of business initiatives, such as CRM, e-Business, ERP, system migrations, mergers & acquisitions and data warehousing.
All such projects require:
- Source system meta-data i.e. trusted information on the location and meaning of source data held on a particular computer system, such as is provided by the source system vendor and /or third parties.
- Data discovery and data quality assessment i.e. a thorough understanding of the actual data values held in the source systems and the ability to construct source system meta-data where this is otherwise lacking.
- Data extraction technologies and middleware i.e. physically extracting the source data, making it available to the data movement and /or ETL technologies.
- Data movement and transformation technologies i.e. a toolset to design, build and implement the actual data movement between source and target systems, plus the ability to define any in-flight data transformations required to map the source system to the target system.
- Data cleansing and enrichment i.e. ETL processing and external data lookups necessary to correct, enhance and enrich the available source data to meet the requirements of the target system(s).