Information Server - Business Value of An Information Server

Business Value of An Information Server

Most key business initiatives cannot succeed without effective integration of information. In fact, the IBM Global CEO survey (Jan 2006) found that organizations that were highly effective at integrating information were five times more likely to generate value than those who were poor at it. Critical business initiatives such as single view of a customer, business intelligence, supply chain management, and Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance require consistent, complete, and trustworthy information. An information server helps companies to integrate information in order to deliver business results within these initiatives faster, with higher quality results.

• For business intelligence, it helps organizations develop a unified view of their business for better decisions by enabling them to understand existing data sources to cleanse, correct, and standardize information, and to load analytical views.
• For master data management, it helps organizations develop authoritative master data by enabling them to understand where and how information is stored across systems, and to consolidate disparate data into a single, reliable record.
• For infrastructure rationalization, it helps organizations reduce operating costs by allowing them to understand relationships between systems, and to define migration rules to consolidate instances or to move data from obsolete systems to new applications and databases.
• For business transformation initiatives, it helps organizations speed development and increase business agility by providing reusable information services that can be seamlessly plugged into applications, business processes, and portals. These standards-based services are maintained centrally by information specialists, with a single point of maintenance, but are widely accessible throughout the enterprise.
• For risk and compliance projects, it helps organizations improve visibility and data governance by allowing organizations to define and maintain complete, authoritative views of information with proof of lineage and quality. These views can be made widely available and reusable as shared services.