Difference between data integration and unification
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Difference between data integration and unification is best to consider through Data Warehouse (DWH). It is widely used technology and it quite often being treated to help company with both crucial data quality issues. Data unification is something what Data Warehouse (DWH) does with ease since it is constructed to gather information from many sources with purpose to speed reports and to store data. All data are in same storage place customized for reporting processes.
Just pulling all data from source systems and placing it into DWH does not necessarily means business logic could be easily restored. Restoration and quantification of business logic means data is also integrated and not only gathered at one place, data unification or single point of truth.
It is not easy to restore business logic with data since data flow on production systems is usually not big enough to describe processes for reporting purposes. Inadequate data flow and missing data are main reasons why DWH cannot by default provide integrated data but unified.
Business side usually misinterprets two terms and considers implementation of DWH will solve all problems in reports. Core reporting problems lie on production level with too little data exchange between systems and DWH cannot resolve it. “Garbage in” means also “garbage out”.
Example of integrated data is presented with following case. Number of customers have bought marketing package A, total number of activated marketing packages should be tightly related with difference between current and last month of newly connected and disconnected packages. Total number of packages should be integrated with new and gone packages. If production systems and billing are only set for processes and not for reporting, it will mean that company will bill service correctly but perhaps will not report reliably. Production systems are usually set for processes not for reporting. If reports are not immediately implemented during production systems deployment phase, additional implementation of reporting procedures into live production system will be far harder. Integration is not same as unification.
It is deeper and harder to achieve then simply implement DWH and make data unification. More details on Innovative Business Intelligence.
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