Data Virtualization: The Way Out of the Analytics Dog House

I have long admired Rick Sherman’s BI and data management writing as it is grounded by the challenging client projects from his Athena IT Solutions consulting practice.

So when I wanted some help in explaining the role of data virtualization as an enabler for analytics, I reached out to Rick.

New White Paper: A Better Way to Fuel Analytical Needs

Rick, David Besemer (Composite’s CTO and Data Virtualization Leadership Blog Contributor), and I started by brainstorming about the issues holding back analytics adoption. We then met to map out how organizations build their analytics today and where data virtualization can help.

Leveraging these discussions, Rick’s hard-earned field experience and additional research, Rick developed a new white paper, A Better Way to Fuel Analytical Needs.

In his white paper, Rick writes that as the BI industry matures and businesses learn more about the power of information, the demand for analytics is being driven more by its business value than by its technical value. The potential value of business analytics and the amount of data to fuel it are significantly expanding, yet BI and data-integration backlogs are constraining enterprises from tapping that value.

Data Silos Are a Challenge

According to Rick, “enterprises have been accumulating and accessing more and more data for years, now is the time to leverage that data using business analytics. Unfortunately, business analysts often spend more time reconciling conflicting numbers from each reporting silo than actually analyzing the data to improve the business.”

Rick counsels that “the best answer to the limitation of physically integrating data into a data warehouse and direct access to data sources on a point-to-point basis is expanding your data integration to include data virtualization. Data virtualization enables IT and data-savvy business people to catalog, provide access to and integrate various data sources.”

Check out Rick’s Blog

Rick’s blog, THE Data Doghouse^SM, is a well-known source for “unleashed observations on the business and technology of performance management, business intelligence, and data warehousing.”  His blog about this white paper is eponymously named, A Better Way to Fuel Analytical Needs.