Session Highlights (2 of 3) - Informatica as an Enterprise Platform

Sara Stonner's presentation on Implementing a PowerCenter-based Enterprise Data Integation Platform was different than what I expected, and so incredibly valuable (not that I thought it wouldn't be valuable; it was just valuable in a different way).

She told the story of Morgan Stanley going from a position where various departmental IT organziations were all evaluating ETL tools to the creation of a centralized, leveragable, managed platform on which all of those IT organizations could develop and deploy their data integration solutions. I was inspired by the story she told. There are probably many organization in which PowerCenter is a centralized solution in one particular IT area - usually Data Warehousing. So many other IT organizations can take advantage of that same DI platform, though, where they might otherwise end up getting data unloads and writing sqlldr scripts, or building a simple Java app to copy data from one database to another. With the right internal PR, support, training, and opportunity, those same organizations can just take advantage of the appropriate tool (PowerCenter) that's already deployed and hosted. Her message about setting up an environment where the barriers to entry were EXTREMELY low (while still securely managing the risk of having so many groups using a single platform) is one the key take aways. In her organization the results were astonishing -- an adoption rate that exceeded their 2-year outlook within just a few months.

Powerful ideas!