Friday, July 19, 2013

Corporate Information Factory Architecture

CIF operational systems topology:
The CIF architecture comprises of the data warehouse and operational data store as the core of the architecture. This is surrounded by metadata management  plane where the operational systems reside Operational systems can include external operational systems, distribution, product, account and customer operational systems. These operational systems add data into data management core through transformations and integrations. Exploration warehouse datamart and data delivery also extract information from the data  management core. The decision support interface may use these data marts while the transaction interface may use the operational data store directly. CIF consumers acquire the information produced via data delivery, manipulate it in datamarts, and assimilate it in their own environments. Outside this metadata management is the Information Services as well as Operations and administration.
The Information Services  comprises of groups of items such as library and toolbox as well as the workbench. The Operations and administration involve systems management, data acquisition management, service management and change management.
Producers are the first link in the information food chain. They synthesize the data into raw information and make it available for consumption across the enterprise.
Operational systems are the core of the day to day operations. The operational systems are organized by the product they support. However, businesses are more customer oriented than product so that they can differentiate their offerings. CIF provides facilities to define how this data relates to a customer using rules that form the metadata.
Operational data usually stand alone so they have not been integrated. CIF synthesizes cleans and integrates the data before it is usable. CIF also acts a history store for the enterprise.
Next, integration and transformation consist of the processes to capture, integrate, transform, cleanse, re-engineer and load the source data into the data warehouse. Typically data is pulled from the operational systems as opposed to pushing. Configuration management and scheduling play a large role here. Typically these packages can be written with the knowledge of the source data and once written don't change too much. So they are good candidates for scheduled jobs.
Next the data warehouse plays the big role in CIF. It is often described as "subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant(temporal) and non-volatile collection of data"  Sizes of up to terabytes of data are not uncommon for a data warehouse.
Next, the data management extends the data warehouse with archival/restoration, partitioning and movement of data based on triggering and aggregation. This is often in house development tasks.
Finally, the consumers extract information from this collection of data.  The data-marts support these analytic requirements and they are made available via the decision support interface.
Also, the metadata enables metrics for measuring support.
Courtesy : Imhoff

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