INFORMATION MANAGEMENT. Transform Your Information into a Strategic Asset

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1 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Transform Your Information into a Strategic Asset

2 The information explosion in all organizations has created a challenge and opportunity for enterprises. When properly managed, information can help you run your business effectively and efficiently by providing critical data needed to drive business processes and transactions. Information can also be a source of knowledge helping your organization increase competitiveness and profitability. However, if your organization lacks a vision and strategy to effectively manage information, the result could lead to information chaos. IT systems across your enterprise could experience data quality problems, such as inconsistent definitions and semantics, silos of information, and a lack of transparency. To overcome these challenges and achieve operational performance, you need a way to transform your information into a strategic asset. Information management solutions from Business Objects, an SAP company, provide the software and professional services to help you deliver trusted information supporting any operational or analytical initiative, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, data migration, or master data management (MDM). As a result, you will have the facilities to provide integrated, cleansed, reconciled, and well-understood information, including structured and unstructured data, across the enterprise. Business Objects. Information Management

3 TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR INFORMATION WITH SOFTWARE FROM BUSINESS OBJECTS Information management software from Business Objects can help you transform your existing IT infrastructure into a more flexible business process and decisionmaking environment. You gain: Efficiency. In a world where the business requirements for information are rapidly changing, you need an effective and efficient way to govern and manage your data. Business Objects gives you a comprehensive portfolio of products for managing all aspects of your data, including solutions for data integration, data quality, master data management, metadata management, and text analysis. Insight. Your business depends on accurate information to gain critical insights to drive business goals and performance optimization. Business Objects delivers trusted information that helps your organization make the right decisions. Flexibility. Turning insight into competitive advantage without disrupting essential business processes requires a flexible, open, and standards-based solution. Business Objects information management software supports services-oriented architecture (SOA), enabling you to build a foundation that supports a flexible business process environment. Designed to support your existing heterogeneous IT environment, Business Objects information management software helps you address a small departmental project or implement enterprisewide standards for managing all information in your organization. Information Management Solutions Help You Transform Enterprise Data into a Strategic Asset by Delivering Trusted Information that Is Integrated, Cleansed, Harmonized, and Well-Understood Business Objects. Information Management

4 Business Objects information management software supports these types of initiatives: Business Intelligence. Deliver integrated information in batch or real-time for reporting and analysis Data Warehousing. Deliver extract, transform, and load (ETL) functionality to build a data warehouse of any size. Data Quality. Understand and cleanse information to correct errors, enrich data, and improve end user trust in their data. Data Integration and Quality Standardization. Standardize on a single data services tool for both your data integration and quality processes. Reduce disparate data integration and data quality tools usage across the enterprise. Master Data Management. Harmonize and drive enterprisewide data definitions and standards to remove barriers to business efficiency caused by conflicting information. Data Migration for IT Systems Consolidation. Simplify your IT infrastructure cleanse and migrate data from legacy database or application systems in support of IT consolidation initiatives. Data Migration for Application Deployments. Cleanse and migrate data from older applications into a new enterprise application deployment or standard. Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). Deliver auditable and trusted data to support GRC initiatives. Information (Data) Governance. Leverage information management capabilities to execute a governance strategy that defines and enforces rules and standards. Enterprise Information Management. Set a vision and strategy for enterprisewide information management that includes governance, policies, and the technology infrastructure to manage and deliver trusted information across the enterprise. Business Objects. Information Management

5 DELIVER TRUSTED INFORMATION WITH INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS FROM BUSINESS OBJECTS Business Objects provides the industry s most complete solution for you to manage and deliver trusted information underpinning your operational or analytical applications. With Business Objects information management software, you can access, integrate, improve, deliver, reconcile, and deliver any type of data, anywhere across the enterprise. Access All Information Over 80% of enterprise information exists in unstructured data sources such as content repositories like and Web logs. Organizations with the means to harness all their information structured and unstructured can gain a considerable advantage and insight into their business and customers. With Business Objects information management software, you have the ability to easily access unstructured text data, identify the entities (such as name, place, sentiment, organization), categorize, and then summarize all this information in a structured way for analysis. Business Objects allows you to access information from any structured data source, such as databases, enterprise applications, legacy systems, and flat files. With Business Objects information management software, you can truly harness the entire spectrum of data types and sources to power your business goals. Integrate and Transform Data Whether your needs are to gain a single view of your business by integrating disparate data sources or to migrate data from one system to another, you will need to effectively access, transform, and deliver it in a form that is meaningful to your target system, such as a data warehouse or ERP system. With Business Objects information management software, you have the industry s easiest-to-use, enterprise-class ETL tool a drag-and-drop interface lets you define a data integration process without coding. Transformational logic is delivered through prebuilt functions that you can easily use all within a single design environment for both ETL and data quality tasks. Improve Data Quality There isn t an organization on the planet that does not have a data quality problem. They are created from the point of data entry with your operational systems (for example, CRM) and persist through your IT infrastructure, affecting downstream applications that depend on this information, such as your BI systems. Business Objects gives you the market-leading technology to profile and cleanse data from any type of operational domain, such as customer, product, or service. Business Objects. Information Management

6 Deliver Data at the Right Time How frequently does your business need information? Is it monthly, daily, or instantaneously? When considering data delivery, it is important to have the ability to deliver it at the right time for your business. With Business Objects information management, you can deliver information in batch and real-time, or physically and virtually. And you can move data from database-to-database or application-toapplication. You can deliver information physically to a database using ETL, or virtually using data federation. Using application integration middleware, you can deliver real-time information between applications. Harmonize Your Data The use of different definitions and terminology to describe common business entities (such as customer, product, or service) creates data redundancy and inconsistencies, resulting in an inability to gain a single view of the business. Left unresolved, these inconsistencies could affect competitiveness, compliance, and customer service while leading to increased IT costs. By creating master data, an organization can harmonize data to be used by the organization on an enterprisewide level. With master data management software, you can consolidate, harmonize, distribute, and centrally manage master data. Whatever your industry, you can improve your business processes, responsiveness, and decision-making capability by aggregating and improving the reliability of your master data. Understand Data Context Have you ever wondered where the numbers in your BI report came from? This is a simple question but the technical implications required to answer such a question can be very complex and time-consuming. To answer this question, you need to capture the metadata, which contains key information context such as when the data was created and where. If the information passed through various systems for example, from its creation in a CRM application to a data warehouse where it is integrated with other information you will need to trace the metadata from all of these systems. With metadata management software from Business Objects, you have a way to easily analyze this metadata and understand relationships such as impact analysis and data lineage. As a result, knowing the context of data, consumers of your information can make confident decisions, and meet compliance requirements for auditing. Also, by knowing exactly how a change in the source application will affect all downstream applications or systems, IT can gain efficiencies in change management. Business Objects. Information Management

7 LEVERAGE COHESIVE OFFERINGS FROM SAP AND BUSINESS OBJECTS With Business Objects information management software, you can effectively meet your organization s enterprisewide information management challenges in any heterogeneous IT environment. When used in combination with each other and with SAP and Business Objects products, you gain even greater benefits through product integration and shared services. Information management products from SAP and Business Objects include: The SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) component enables you to consolidate, synchronize, distribute, centrally manage, and publish any type of master data object across your enterprise and with trading partners. By providing a central view of all strategic data, it helps you improve business processes and lays the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture. SAP NetWeaver MDM Provides a Single View of Customer, Product, Supplier, Financial, and Employee Data BusinessObjects Data Services is the industry's first single product for enterpriseclass data integration and data quality. It provides a single development, runtime, and management environment that allows you to integrate, transform, improve, and deliver data anywhere at any frequency. BusinessObjects Data Services is Web services-enabled to support your SOA architecture. BusinessObjects Data Services includes all functionality of BusinessObjects Data Integrator and BusinessObjects Data Quality Management products. Business Objects. Information Management

8 BusinessObjects Data Services Is a Single Application for Data Integration and Data Quality. From a Single, Drag-and-Drop Development User Interface, You Can Build Both ETL and Data Quality Jobs BusinessObjects Data Integrator provides enterprise-class ETL functionality that allows organizations to easily explore, extract, transform, and deliver data anywhere, at any frequency. Ensure the integrity of your data, maximize developer productivity, and accelerate data integration performance for all operational and analytic initiatives. BusinessObjects Data Quality Management allows organizations to easily centralize the discovery, correction, and prevention of data quality issues across the enterprise through a single graphical interface. Ensure the integrity of your data, maximize developer productivity, and ensure complete data for all operational and analytic initiatives. With trusted, timely, and accurate information, your information users will have a solid foundation for decision-making. BusinessObjects Data Quality Management for enterprise applications provides embedded data quality capabilities within the enterprise application environment. Supported capabilities include real-time global address correction and verification at point of data entry while preventing duplication of stored information. This allows users to improve the efficiency of their business processes, increase system adoption, and provide more thorough service to clients and business prospects. Enterprise applications supported include SAP ERP and SAP CRM, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Siebel. Business Objects. Information Management

9 Universal Data Cleanse (UDC), a feature of Business Objects Data Quality Management and Data Services, allows you to cleanse any type data regardless of industry or operational domain. UDC parses, standardizes, and identifies noncustomer and region-specific data such as product or service data. Typically, customers feed that information to operational applications that perform further processing for analysis by the business, or they feed it into a matching solution that looks to uncover the overlap, duplicates, or other relationships to gain efficiencies. UDC extends the data cleansing capabilities beyond customer information. BusinessObjects Data Insight lets you monitor, analyze, and report on the quality of information. Gain control of information assets with redundancy profiling, drill-down frequency distributions, cross-column and cross-table comparisons, and pattern recognition and analysis. Cleansing and data standard rules can be directly passed to BusinessObjects Data Quality Management, which creates very efficient integration. BusinessObjects Metadata Management is an open metadata solution that consolidates metadata from disparate tools and sources, including BI, ETL, relational databases, modeling tools, and third-party metadata into a single repository. Easily view and analyze the integrated metadata to get information on data usage, endto-end change impact analysis, and report-to-source data lineage. Deliver trusted data for compliance requirements, internal controls, and improved decision-making. BusinessObjects Text Analysis reads unstructured text data in more than 30 languages, extracting key information so unstructured text data can be used as a data source for data integration or business intelligence, uncovering hidden information in CRM systems, Web, s, and other text sources. Applications include Voice of the Customer, Root Cause Analysis, Link Analysis, Shareholder Value Analysis, Employee Satisfaction Analysis, and more. BusinessObjects Text Analysis is available as a standalone product or as an add-on to BusinessObjects Data Services and BusinessObjects Data Integrator. BusinessObjects Rapid Marts packages provide prebuilt data mart solutions for over 30 enterprise applications including SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Siebel. BusinessObjects Rapid Marts combine domain knowledge and data integration best practices in prebuilt data models, transformation logic, and data extraction. BusinessObjects Rapid Marts are available as an add-on to BusinessObjects Data Services and BusinessObjects Data Integrator. Business Objects. Information Management

10 BusinessObjects Data Federator is an enterprise information integration (EII) or data federation tool for quickly integrating data without physically moving or storing the integrated data. It begins by making disparate data sources look like a single data source to your users. Then you can automatically generate a single Business Objects universe that maps to multiple sources. You can provide this single view of disparate sources from a code-free, rule-based mapping language that allows you to intuitively define business rules and create source-to-view mapping. BusinessObjects Watchlist Security allows organizations to automatically match their internal company databases against government or association watch lists to uncover matches or suspect transactions. Verifying current business data against these lists ensures that organizations are not unknowingly supporting identified criminal suspects such as terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, or individuals from sanctioned countries. BusinessObjects Postalsoft provides mail automation software that can be customized to precisely meet your needs no matter what size your organization may be. From address correction and encoding, to mail preparation and entry planning all Postalsoft solutions are CASS (USPS certification process for ZIP + 4 matching software) and PAVE (program measuring presort accuracy) certified and consist of the same proven modules, which can be scaled to provide the capabilities you require. Business Objects. Information Management 10

11 LET OUR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES WORK FOR YOU Business Objects offers world-class information management professional services to guide you along your data journey. These services can help you develop a vision, strategy, architecture, and roadmap for success. SAP Data Migration Readiness Assessment. For those customers looking to implement their SAP ERP, this offering assesses their state of readiness for migrating legacy data into SAP ERP. As part of the analysis, we look at a number of areas from the data itself including the quality and ability to map across to SAP ERP, the data governance organization and processes, the way master data is managed currently, and at the integration methods in place. Information Management Vision Workshop. This workshop is a summit-like offering, typically lasting two to three days. It begins with a comprehensive overview and critique of your current information management environment and leads to a set of high-level recommendations for how to embark on a sound path towards information management, along with an honest assessment of your risks and how to mitigate them. Information Management Current State Assessment. This is a thorough, endto-end offering that typically lasts four weeks and covers all aspects of your information management in its current state from the underlying tools and platforms to the quality of the reports and analytics delivered from that environment. Information Management Strategy, Architecture, and Roadmap. An offering that encompasses the Information Management Current State Assessment described above but also continues into the exploration of multiple could-be alternatives to achieve the desired future should-be state of information management for your enterprise. Typically lasting 10 to12 weeks, the offering culminates in a phased, iterative, and incremental roadmap that depicts in detail what information management capabilities you should deliver and when over the next three to five years. SAP Services for Master Data Management. These services help you to plan, build, and run software. A field-tested roster of tools, methods, and best practices will help shorten the journey and lead to secure, efficient, and cost-effective deployments. SAP Strategic Data Services for SAP NetWeaver MDM. These services provide expert guidance in many key areas such as data governance, data quality analysis, optimal design and implementation of data consolidation, related business rules, and matching strategies. Business Objects. Information Management 11

12 DRIVE RESULTS WITH BUSINESS OBJECTS INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES Business Objects information management software delivers trusted information through a unified solution that includes data services for data integration and data quality, master data management, and end-to-end metadata. To overcome the challenges of information management and to achieve operational performance, Business Objects delivers solutions and professional services to help you transform your organization s information into a strategic asset. Business Objects. Information Management 12

13 ABOUT BUSINESS OBJECTS, AN SAP COMPANY As an independent business unit within SAP, Business Objects transforms the way the world works by connecting people, information, and businesses. Together with one of the industry s strongest and most diverse partner networks, the company delivers business performance optimization to customers worldwide across all major industries, including financial services, retail, consumer-packaged goods, healthcare, and public sector. With open, heterogeneous applications in the areas of governance, risk, and compliance; enterprise performance management; and business intelligence; and through global consulting and education services, Business Objects enables organizations of all sizes around the globe to close the loop between business strategy and execution. Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. The company s stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ) and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR BOB) stock exchanges. More information about Business Objects can be found at Business Objects. Information Management 13

14 NOTES Business Objects. Information Management 14

15 NOTES Business Objects. Information Management 15

16 businessobjects.com 2008 Business Objects. All rights reserved. Business Objects owns the following U.S. patents, which may cover products that are offered and licensed by Business Objects: 5,555,403; 5,857,205; 6,289,352; 6,247,008; 6,490,593; 6,578,027; 6,831,668; 6,768,986; 6,772,409; 6,882,998; 7,139,766; 7,299,419; 7,194,465; 7,222,130; 7,181,440 and 7,181,435. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Business Objects Crystal Vision, Business Process On Demand, BusinessQuery, Crystal Analysis, Crystal Applications, Crystal Decisions, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Insider, Crystal Reports, Desktop Intelligence, Inxight, the Inxight Logo, LinguistX, Star Tree, Table Lens, ThingFinder, Timewall, Let there be light, Metify, NSite, Rapid Marts, RapidMarts, the Spectrum Design, Web Intelligence, Workmail and Xcelsius are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and/or other countries of Business Objects and/or affiliated companies. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. July 2008 BR358-C