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philipon
Associate
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Big Data has become an important driver for change in the digital economy. Organizations are increasingly using Big Data technologies such as Hadoop and Cloud platforms for storing and managing massive volumes of data from a variety of types. Big Data initiatives presents new ways for organizations to gain fresh insights and predict business outcomes. In order to achieve these lofty goals, organizations need to address three key foundational information management areas: connecting Big Data with enterprise data from existing applications and systems, understanding metadata and thus the context and relationships of your Big Data sources, and improving the data quality in your Big Data sources so that the information is ready for action.

Enterprise Data Integration

Big Data technologies empower an enterprise with access to new types and massive amounts of data for insights from social media, Internet of Things, and customer contact information, to name a few. Having access to all of this new information is purely an academic exercise if there is no connection of your Big Data with your existing business strategies and operations. In order to realize the value of Big Data insights, organizations need to effectively integrate Big Data with their enterprise data such as customers, sales, products, and employees. Your enterprise data is typically created and used by your enterprise applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM). Organizations that have invested in Big Data technologies need an enterprise-class data integration platform to help them integrate Big Data with their enterprise data with minimum impact on the transaction system. With SAP solutions for data integration, you gain market leading data integration that offers all styles of data movement in a single offering with the ability to integrate Big Data with your operational systems without impacting its performance.

Enterprise Metadata Management

Having the right information at the right time is everything in a digital economy. But how do you know if you have the right information so that you can use it with confidence? In order to address this question, you need to know the definition of the data and its relevance to your business decision, date and time of the data refresh, source systems that the data came from,  and calculations applied to the data such as currency conversion.  In the world of Big Data, where the data typically does not have a typically defined schema, having this contextual information will mean the difference between hearing static noise or reading Morse code. In essence, “metadata” which is information about your “data” provides you with the ability to understand if the data that you are using is relevant and timely for the business process or decision. Having an effective enterprise metadata management solution that encompasses Big Data will give your business the context they need to make the right decisions based on the right information. With SAP solutions for metadata management, you can see impact analysis and data lineage for all of your enterprise systems including Hadoop.

Enterprise Data Quality

How do you keep your data lake from turning into a swamp? It’s all about the “data quality” and Big Data systems are no exception. Today, Big Data systems are capturing tons of data but there is little to no governance of the data in order to make this data useful. Organizations that can extend their data stewardship and quality programs to include Big Data sources can dramatically benefit from having standardized policies and rules for improving data. For example, if you are capturing data from social media to understand customer satisfaction to a new product or service, you will need to enhance this data to address typos and inconsistencies in the spelling created by human error. Without an enterprise-class data quality solution to address these issues at scale, this new information from social media is meaningless. With SAP solutions for data quality, you have the market leading data quality technology to improve data accuracy, integrity, consistency which would result in better decisions and business processes.

In summary, organizations that are embarking on Big Data initiatives, need to address these 3 areas of information management in order to accelerate their business results. See how SAP solutions for Enterprise Information Management can help you! www.sap.com/eim