Data Profiling Solutions for Today's Hot Projects

EXCERPT from DM Review Magazine, March 2000, by Craig Olson
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Companies are now turning their attention to high-priority projects such as customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce and data-warehousing. Many innovative enterprises are discovering data profiling and mapping solutions that help solve the enormous data migration, integration and consolidation challenges these projects entail. By gaining a thorough knowledge of their data, these companies achieve faster project completion, improved data quality, reduced risk

At each point where an e- commerce application integrates with another system, there are at least two views of the data. When the two views have inconsistent fields, formats or definitions, the differences must be resolved before the systems can be integrated.

Most organizations rely on manual analysis to resolve data quality problems and differences between systems. This difficult and time- consuming task generally results in lengthy delays in deployment of the e- commerce system, reduction and simplification of the integration points ­ which means that desirable features such as personalization are either eliminated or reduced in effectiveness, and integration errors and major data quality problems ­ which anger customers and lose business. …

Unfortunately, conventional methods for analyzing real data take a great deal of time, involve only small samples of the data and fail to deliver a complete understanding of the source data. Manual or semi-automated processing techniques cannot possibly compare the thousands of attributes and millions of values necessary to uncover the relationships. The answer is a new category of software called data profiling and mapping which offers a fast, accurate and automated way to understand your data. It enables a small, focused team of technical and business users to quickly perform the highly complex tasks necessary to achieve a thorough understanding of source data. This level of understanding cannot be achieved through conventional approaches.

Data profiling and mapping software enables data migration and integration projects to be completed successfully the first time, eliminating extensive design rework and late-stage project cancellations. It can even warn IT management when the business objectives of the project are not supported by the data, dramatically lowering project risk and enabling valuable resources to be re- directed to other, more fruitful projects. Finally, data profiling and mapping delivers higher data quality.

Source:  DM Review, March 2000, Craig Olson