Blog: Barry Devlin

« Enterprise search, Web 2.0 and BI | Main | Instant Gratification vs. Quality Time »

Access to quality external data

I was at the Business Object Summit this week in Boston, where the main emphasis was on linking strategy to execution and a seeming focus on the larger enterprises. All very SAP-inspired, I thought. And very insightful, especially if you're a large enterprise. There have been some comments in the blogs already on these topics. But it was a small conversation over lunch that caught my interest...

Information OnDemand. No, not the annual IBM Conference in Las Vegas, in October. But a rather low key effort from Business Objects with a website to allow companies to access market data and incorporate it into their BI efforts.

There's a definite growing interest these days in combining external data with the contents of the warehouse. But it does raise some concerns, not least about the reliability of the external data and how to create a valid semantic relationship between the two data sets. In the past, companies have addressed these concerns by obtaining key market and other external data from trusted sources like Dunn and Bradstreet, Reuters and others and then ensuring that such data entered the warehouse via a controlled feed designed by Information Architects who could match the two data sets correctly. After all, such external data is another information source for the warehouse and should be managed like any other.

This method works well for large enterprises with a centrally-controlled approach to the warehouse. And where the value-add derived from or risks incurred by using this data are significant, this method is probably still required. But what if you are a small or medium enterprise? Or what if you really only want to do a couple of once off analyses?

Shopping at the Information OnDemand website appears to be the answer! Here you can buy prebuilt, but customizable, reports combining your data with external market and financial data. You can buy one-time snapshots or subscribe for regular updates.

For larger companies, this could provide a safe and cost-effective way of dipping their toe in the big ocean of external data. For smaller companies, it could be all they need. Sounds like a useful idea to me!

The service has been available since September 2007, but I hadn't come across it before. Maybe there are some similar services I should know about, so please feel free to comment.

Posted by Barry Devlin on Thursday, 14 August 2008 | Permalink