EAI and Data Stewardship

Written by Richard Milam

While participating in a MDM (Master Data Management) summit in New York last month, I learned some new lingo and my favorites are Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Data Stewardship.

For the uninitiated (as I was before the conference), MDM is the moniker for the tools and processes to aggregate, cleanse and analyze off-line data for the purposes of minimizing erroneous redundancy and to provide business intelligence to executive management.  That is my definition not Wikipedia’s - but it’s close.  Recognizable components are data warehouses, data repositories, etc.

The vendors participating seem to have few competitive advantages over each other and thus consolidation is rampant.  The common phrase I kept hearing with regard to how business is won is the “bakeoff”.  A bakeoff is where the vendors do the work to aggregate, model and cleans a prospective client’s transactional data and then present their results against their competitor’s in an attempt to win the business.  It seems like a fair way to size up alternatives but, of course, it does not help to gauge whether a vendor will be a good partner providing great ongoing service and market leadership.

The reason why EAI is a new favorite acronym is that it describes our new offering Foxtrot X (X for application eXtender) to a “T”.  Foxtrot X enables the integration and interoperability of disparate applications by allowing FoxtrotOne scripts to be activated via a user created menu or button that is associated or “glued” to the target application as if it was placed there by the original developer.  The ground breaking implications are that without an SDK or custom programming, applications that required error prone and time consuming duplicate data entry can now seamlessly integrate and share information. 

Wikipedia has a great EAI definition and lists advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

• Real time information access among systems 
• Streamlines business processes and helps raise organizational efficiency
• Maintains information integrity across multiple systems 
• Ease of development and maintenance 

Disadvantages:

• Prohibitively high development costs, especially for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)
• EAI implementations are very time consuming, and need a lot of resources
• Require a fair amount of up front design, which many managers are not able to envision or not willing to invest in. Most EAI projects usually start off as point-to-point efforts, very soon becoming unmanageable as the number of applications increase.

Those who have acquired and have been using FoxtrotOne technology know that hands down, EnableSoft’s technology and approach eliminates ALL of the disadvantages.  I think it is safe to say that Foxtrot technology will be making the rounds at future MDM gatherings.

Oh and Data Stewardship.  I love that because that is what Foxtrot users have been doing for over 14 years.

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