Distributed Thinking

We're looking at how we can create a reporting and analytics service that can respond quickly to new requests for information.  The motivation for this is that business intelligence requirements change quickly; managers and data analysts frequently come up with questions for which they require access to new data in order to answer. Many organisations have a dedicated BI team who can concentrate on the needs of their data analysts and other users. The most effective BI teams - by which I mean those teams who provide the most useful information to the people who need it - are multi-disciplinary teams that include business users, data analysts, data architects, and ETL developers. Unfortunately, our current structure hinders this integrated approach.  We don't have the resources to dedicate a team to each of our services, because we run over 100 application services.  Instead, we have development teams and a support team, and a planning process that lets us assign staff effort

Over the last few weeks, we've been working with some consultants to assess our approach to integrating business processes that involve multiple IT systems.  We have an ambition to replace many old point-to-point data transfers with more modern integration technology, enabling a more responsive user experience.  As we are consolidating many of our existing applications and gradually moving to more cloud-based services, we will need to replace many of our existing integrations and this provides an opportunity to transform our approach. We're planning to support three types of integration: Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) for message-based, inter-system processes API Management for enabling portals and innovative user-facing apps Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) for where we still need to move large amounts of data On the technical front, the consultants recommend that we adopt one of a small number of cloud-based integration platforms.  The next step is to plan and exe