OREANDA-NEWS. Information governance and integration needs are evolving to support digital transformation, and recent enterprise information management (EIM) product innovations from SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) can help companies simplify how they manage data and associated policies, utilize Big Data and empower their businesses with self-service data access and preparation.

The opportunity with data in the digital economy is to help companies gain instant insights to enable them to reimagine business models, processes and work. Simplifying how data is used in business processes and shared across business networks can help improve areas such as customer experience, supplier collaboration and employee engagement.

Self-Service Data Preparation Helps Empower Real-Time Business Insight

The SAP Agile Data Preparation application is a business-user oriented, interactive tool that helps derive value from data with data access, transformation and integration capabilities to help reduce the time and complexity of preparing data for analysis. The 1.3 version of SAP Agile Data Preparation introduces new data aggregation and filtering capabilities that can help users speed up the time it takes to combine multiple or large data sets and view only the data that has significantly changed. Prepared data sets can then be shared and consumed by analytical applications, such as SAP Lumira® software, or used in data migration and master governance scenarios, enabling users to spend more time analyzing the data instead of preparing it.

“In the digital economy, companies that are capable of delivering the most current and accurate data in the most easily consumable way possible are the ones that will survive and thrive,” said Philip On, vice president, Enterprise Information Management Solutions, SAP. “Consequently, we’re continuing to make strategic investments in our EIM solutions to help us evolve to meet market needs. The right EIM solutions can help business agility and provide a rich environment for innovation.”

Big Data Support Helps Extend Analytical Context

Companies are looking to fuel digital transformation by utilizing Big Data sources to extend analytical context and insight. The 4.2 SP6 version of SAP Data Services software offers enhanced support for Hadoop, NoSQL, JSON and spatial data. Responding to requests from customers, SAP and Google have collaborated to bring bidirectional extract-transform-load (ETL) capabilities to Google BigQuery. This solution helps not just write data to but also move data from BigQuery, making it easier for customers managing complex nested data like JSON in BigQuery to move it into other targets such as Hadoop.

SAP Data Services also provides bidirectional ETL support for MongoDB, as well as dynamic metadata synchronization, which can help with accurate lineage and impact analysis for Big Data. Improved integration with Hadoop includes dynamic mapping of Hive tables and the ability to configure SAP Data Services to run in Hadoop clusters on Linux and Windows. Spatial data from Microsoft SQL Server can be accessed to support geospatial analysis.

“The redistribution of data into silos and enablement of data access anytime from anywhere is helping to elevate the conversation about data integrity, trust and availability to the business, and driving the need for data governance,” said Stewart Bond, director of Data Integration Software at IDC. “Policy and master data management are hot topics for organizations attempting to gain control and higher levels of data integrity, as their users are asking for self-service data preparation capabilities on data they can trust for decision making.”

Policy Management Helps Improve Governance Transparency

Chief data officers and other business leaders are starting to treat information as a business asset, and they are looking for solutions to help them simplify how they manage data policies and make those policies more visible across the enterprise. The 4.2 SP6 version of the SAP Information Steward software introduces information policy management capabilities to help centralize policy creation and maintenance as well as simplify collaboration and governance. SAP Information Steward can help enable customers to link those policies to the business rules that enforce them, as well as monitor and score execution of the business rules.

Master Data Management Enables Business Network Collaboration

Quality master data is critical for companies striving to seamlessly connect processes between their digital core and those of their customers, suppliers and partners. The 8.0 version of the SAP Master Data Governance application can help span master data domains and support consolidation and central governance use cases in a single product. Using the data integration and data quality services of the SAP HANA® platform, master data can be quickly consolidated from heterogeneous SAP and non-SAP sources, standardized, and used to create a single best record. Clean and standardized data can then be shared and synchronized across cloud and on premise applications.