IBM® WebSphere® Information Analyzer automates the task of source data analysis by expediting comprehensive data profiling and minimizing overall costs and resources for critical data integration projects.
WebSphere Information Analyzer represents the next generation in data analysis tools, which are characterized by these attributes:
The following scenarios show how WebSphere Information Analyzer helps organizations understand their data to facilitate integration projects.
The company uses WebSphere Information Analyzer to profile its source systems and create master data around key business dimensions, including customer, vendor, item (finished goods), and material (raw materials). They plan to migrate data into a single master SAP environment and a companion SAP BW reporting platform.
To meet the federal mandate, the brokerage house uses WebSphere Information Analyzer to inventory their data, identify integration points, remove data redundancies, and document disparities between applications. The firm now has a repeatable and auditable methodology that leverages automated data analysis. By ensuring that all transactions are processed quickly and uniformly, the company is better able to track and respond to risk resulting from its clients’ and its own investments.
WebSphere Information Analyzer allows the owner-operators to better understand and analyze their legacy data. It allows them to quickly increase the accuracy of their business intelligence reports and restore executive confidence in their company data. Moving forward, they implemented a data quality solution to cleanse their customer data and spot trends over time, further increasing their confidence in the data.
After obtaining project requirements, a project manager initiates the analysis phase of data integration to understand source systems and design target systems. Too often, analysis can be a laborious, manual process that relies on out-of-date (or nonexistent) source documentation or the knowledge of the people who maintain the source systems. But source system analysis is crucial to understanding what data is available and its current state.
Figure 1 shows the role of analysis in IBM Information Server. WebSphere Information Analyzer plays a key role in preparing data for integration by analyzing business information to assure that it is accurate, consistent, timely, and coherent.
Data analysis helps you see the content and structure of data before you start a project and continues to provide useful insight as part of the integration process. The following data management tasks use data analysis: