Implementing a Data Integration Strategy For Legacy Modernization

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A White Paper

Implementing a Data Integration Strategy

For Legacy Modernization

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1 Introduction

2 Data Integration Strategic Requirements

2 Comprehensive Data Access and Connectivity 2 Real-Time Integration

3 Integrated Data Quality Services

4 Big Benefits in Legacy Modernization With Data Integration

5 Information Builders – Delivering Data Integration to Federal Agencies

7 iWay Data Integration Successes in Federal Agencies

7 NASA

7 U.S. Air and Space Expeditionary Force 7 Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control

8 Conclusion

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Information Builders

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Introduction

In most Federal agencies today, critical data is completely siloed into disparate systems - both structured and unstructured. It resides in countless formats within numerous sources, making it difficult to access, correlate, and use. Decision-makers must often visit several different systems to retrieve the data they need. In his blog, Forrester’s Noel Yuhanna says, “It’s become a nightmare to try to integrate the proliferation of data across these sources in order to deliver the unified view of business data required to support new business applications, analytics, and real-time insights.”1

In addition to the siloed nature of legacy systems, many of the components are aging and built upon technology that is decades behind the industry. As agencies needs have evolved, so have the data volumes and requirements to collaborate in the context of inter-agency information sharing. These new demands have driven the need to modernize and refresh an aging population of applications such as Financial, HR, Logistics, and Operations. Furthermore, the new generation of applications need to be created in an agile environment and be able to take advantage of emerging concepts such as big data, social media, and a litany of forward-looking predictive tools. How can a stakeholder get a complete view of the citizen, or another important entity, if each system must be queried independently? Without a seamless, single view of information, decisions and strategies for legacy modernization will be incomplete and ill-informed.

Furthermore, manual integration efforts have put a tremendous strain on IT resources. Applications that require data from multiple systems must be custom-coded, programmed to query each data source individually, then merge the results before delivering them to the end user. Unfortunately, none of this custom development is reusable. New applications that require similar queries will still need coding work in their own particular language or design environment. Data quality issues also arise when multi-source information cannot be viewed simultaneously. Accuracy and consistency are negatively impacted when data must be manually collected and consolidated from multiple systems. This makes it even more difficult to effectively leverage information for decision-making.

It is imperative that agencies consider data integration strategy to support legacy modernization. This solution brief will explore key data integration requirements and benefits to enable successful legacy modernization while lowering operational costs and risk. It also provides a summary of successful integration solutions deployed in federal government.

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Implementing a Data Integration Strategy For Legacy Modernization

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The complexity and time-sensitivity of IT environments, along with increasing project costs and risk, necessitate a data integration strategy that should not only unify information assets across legacy and distributed systems, but also support critical operational and analytical needs. Agencies can optimize core activities and empower real-time decision-making with these strategic data integration requirements in place.

Comprehensive Data Access and Connectivity

Traditional data integration scenarios rely on relational databases. However, truly effective, broad-reaching enterprise integration requires consistent, universal access to all data, regardless of its source or type. Even the smallest gaps in accessibility will severely limit the benefits of data integration and result in continued data silos. For example, a reporting application that can only draw data from five out of eight enterprise systems will deliver only partial insight and lead to flawed decisions.

Today’s agencies need data integration solutions that can access information from a variety of different sources, including inter-and intra-agency systems, non-government data, and cloud- and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions. Support for industry-standard message formats, as well as the ability to retrieve unstructured data from social media sites, big data repositories, and documents, is also crucial to enabling seamless enterprise-scale integration.

Real-Time Integration

Latency requirements will also vary from one type of data to another. Some information may demand immediate integration, while other data may be less urgent. Data integration styles and related tools can be paired with these latency requirements. A comprehensive data integration solution should support both batch and real-time integration.

While agencies are geared towards more ETL or batch-style data integration, real-time information access is becoming crucial in many modernized IT environments. There is zero latency in this more current style of integration, as the data is immediately unified as it is generated or as it arrives from an external source. The timeliness and accuracy of information is preserved, which is why many experts agree that real-time integration should be the primary approach considered for modern integration projects.

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Implementing a Data Integration Strategy For Legacy Modernization 3 Information Builders

Integrated Data Quality Services

Data integration activities present a unique opportunity to enhance the integrity of information. During the transformation and integration process, agencies have the chance to inspect information, ensuring its accuracy and validity before it is unified with other enterprise data. This proactively prevents bad data from spreading and polluting other sources.

That’s why real-time data quality tools should be an integral part of the integration process. These tools can be dynamically invoked during integration to ensure that all data conforms to accepted standards (formats for addresses, names, phone numbers, etc.), to flag and/or merge duplicate records, or to automatically fill in missing information using enrichment techniques, such as mining existing data to determine the missing details (i.e., the city and state fields can yield the correct entry for a missing zip code).

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A solid data integration strategy, supported by world-class integration solutions, can deliver advantages in a variety of areas, including:

Reduced Project Risk

Information consistency across applications is crucial for ensuring smooth execution of business processes. For example, new systems should seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure (portal access, single-sign on and existing database security) while maintaining data integrity to deliver services efficiently and accurately. Data integration solutions with built-in data quality management can ensure this kind of synchronicity and integrity, thus reducing risk by maintaining data integrity when sharing information among internal and external sources.

Decreased Costs in System Migration and Consolidation

As agencies seek to streamline their information architectures or modernize their legacy systems, more are embarking on crucial migration projects. With data integration, these agencies can eliminate the cumbersome and costly custom development work often required to complete these projects by automating data movement and transformation from end to end.

Foundation for Analytics

Agencies need to find efficient and effective ways to collect, consolidate, and present their diverse and disparate data to support mission-critical, real-time reporting and analytical activities. A world-class integration infrastructure can streamline data extraction, transformation, and delivery, ensuring that all enterprise data, regardless of its source or format, can be rapidly delivered to those that need to make decisions (managers, analysts, partners, and citizens) anytime, anywhere.

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Information Builders has helped agencies become more efficient, agile, and responsive during the legacy modernization journey with its leading iWay application and data integration solution. iWay Integration Suite facilitates agency-wide and cross-agency integration – faster, more cost effectively, and with less risk. iWay empowers the federal government to:

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n Leverage investments in legacy systems ■

n Develop a model for inter-agency collaboration and information sharing ■

n Improve coordination and monitoring of integrated processes and services ■

n Automate key documents and enhance data quality to ensure standardization and compliance

Comprehensive integration capabilities ensure rapid access to timely, accurate data across all systems, processes, and stakeholders.

The iWay Integration Suite offers all the features and capabilities needed to consolidate, access, and display any data from any combination of sources – from CRM and ERP applications to legacy databases and cloud-based systems, even social media and other unstructured sources. With iWay, information can be seamlessly unified, in batch or in real-time, to support critical reporting and analysis activities, or for other strategic purposes such as streamlining operations or breaking down functional silos.

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Real-Time Application/Data Message-Based Integration

iWay Integration Suite lays the foundation for real-time integration, ensuring that all operational data and applications are readily available for reporting and analysis, in real time. The integration solution is especially tailored for heterogeneous environments with mix of legacy and newer technologies to enhance vital operations, increase staff productivity, and reduce expenses – while minimizing costs and risk – by automating key processes across a business.

Comprehensive Data Integration

iWay’s powerful, comprehensive set of automated tools dramatically simplifies data integration, including the creation, maintenance, and expansion of data warehouses, data marts, and operational data stores to support reporting and analysis. With its intuitive, easy-to-use interface, iWay enables fast, flexible, end-to-end data integration process creation involving heterogeneous data structures across disparate computing platforms.

Data Quality Services

iWay Integration Suite can be extended to leverage comprehensive, fully customizable business rules and a portfolio of localized dictionaries – as well as advanced unification, validation, cleansing, and enrichment techniques – to not only identify and correct bad data that already exists, but also to proactively prevent new invalid or corrupt information from entering the environment and polluting other sources. Optimize the accuracy and validity of enterprise information throughout its lifecycle with a high-performance environment that provides profiling, cleansing, and enrichment – online or batch – at a rate of five million records per hour.

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NASA

iWay integration technologies enabled the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility’s (MAF) Paperless. Manufacturing Execution System (PMES) to eliminate shortcomings in labor, manufacturing, and engineering efforts. MAF had no visibility in some areas, relied on paper-based processes in others, and lacked exposure to information outside of organizational silos. NASA implemented PMES using a third-party application to track labor, parts, rework, etc. iWay provided batch, transactional, and real-time integration, allowing them to reuse existing infrastructure, instead of taking a “rip-and-replace” approach, to gain insight into MAF manufacturing processes.

Benefits realized:

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n Improved performance and productivity ■

n Reduced operating costs ■

n Better management of important programs and initiatives

U.S. Air and Space Expeditionary Force

Empowering authorized personnel at 72 home stations, 200 transient stations, and higher headquarter agencies to track 1,500 mobility aircraft and associated equipment, personnel, and supplies around the world was a key priority for this agency’s Logistics Integration Division. iWay Software was employed to collect and combine data from disparate systems, giving command and control staff a common, real-time view of mission operations and logistics resources. iWay has helped to centralize and streamline the management of aircraft and related supplies, dramatically improving planning and decision-making, and reducing operating costs.

Benefits realized:

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n Increased visibility across the entire organization ■

n Reduced operating costs ■

n Improved sharing of critical information with other agencies

Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control

iWay Software supports Lockheed Martin’s Department of Defense and Intelligence Community customers in areas such as advanced missile, rocket, and space systems. The company created a comprehensive, secure data connectivity architecture that unifies a wide array of IT assets – such as Sybase and SAP systems – into a single, virtual information system with shared data structures, transactions, and business logic. This environment supports an enterprise-wide reporting solution, making any information from any source uniformly accessible to business applications.

Benefits realized:

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n Increased visibility across the entire organization ■

n Reduced legacy modernization project risk ■

n Accelerated time to deploy of applications

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As federal agencies seek to improve service, despite shrinking budgets, they are also under intense scrutiny from the public, as well as other executive branches and Congress. They must enhance productivity and cost-efficiency, while boosting transparency, accountability, and performance. Creation of a fully unified data quality and integration infrastructure will become an extremely relevant part of legacy modernization initiatives; for providing complete, accurate, and timely data accessible to employees, citizens, and constituents; at lower cost and risk.

Only Information Builders combines marketing-leading integration and data quality technologies to provide a comprehensive solution to support legacy modernization, so agencies have all the capabilities they need to consolidate, access, and display any data from any source to support critical real-time reporting and analysis activities, while laying the groundwork for other strategic integration projects.

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