Integration of Big Data in your current data management process or program is what every organization is trying to do in order to call themselves a ‘Modern Data-Driven Organization’. If organizations have just decided to jump on the bandwagon, to help them save some time, we have compiled a list of some important tips for successful enterprise-wide data integration.
Integration and Collection are NOT the Same
Hadoop is the most common tool that is used for loading data. It is fast, cheap and easily captures data from sources that originate inside or outside the organization. This allows the organizations to have a healthy amount of useful business insights.
However, for realizing the potential of this collected data, the organization will be required to integrate this collected data with their existing data management program as per the policies of data governance. Hadoop is only for collecting data and it cannot integrate the same itself. While the term, ‘Data Lake’ is now widely associated with the Big Data, it is nothing more than a data dump without data integration.
Big Data Quality Improvement
As mentioned above, Hadoop only collects data and cannot automatically integrate it; but it also requires you to embed the data quality in each integration process. While things were much more difficult with the first version of Hadoop as it was coupled with MapReduce, Hadoop 2.x comes with YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator), which provides a much better management of resources by allowing the processing of data which does not belong to the MapReduce programming model in the cluster of Hadoop.
This allows integration of data as well as the quality functions to be together executed in the Hadoop Distributed File System. A large number of vendors offer the services of improving the quality of data and it is essential to get yourself acquainted with such SaaS offerings to ensure successful data integration.
Introduce New Behaviors
New Big Data analytics will also require you to introduce new behaviors as the companies that struggle or get minor success with Big Data often use the analytics for the support purposes, whereas the companies that achieve great success with Big Data use it to transform their conversations. This makes it very important to encourage collaborative work, sharing, add more processes as well as re-evaluate and rethink the current incentives.
Understand your Metadata
The top-most priority of most of the organizations is to integrate Big Data in MDM (Master Data Management), especially the data received from social media. But it is very important to first understand your metadata, as in the core Big Data integration is all about collecting data from various sources and then getting them together in order to increase the value of your data.
Thus, understanding of the metadata will make the process easier for you. Moreover, a thorough understanding of your metadata will also allow you to understand the changes that were made to the data, track movement of the data, business rules applied on it and the outcome of those changes.
Remember these tips to ensure that your enterprise-wide data integration is successful and free from any kind of roadblocks.