Trillium Software

Solution Guide
Reusability
across:
Applications
Business processes
Geographies
Departments
Lines of business
Operating systems
Time
with consistent
results
Data Quality Enterprise Architecture
The quality of data is an issue that stretches across every enterprise:
across business units, across business processes, across departments,
across geographies, and across time. Each place where data is created,
each time data is moved or transformed, each time data is modifed,
the opportunity for errors is introduced, the potential for duplicates is
revisited, and the likelihood for data-related problems is re-introduced.
The most ef cient way to combat rampant data quality issues is to
develop a data quality strategy that includes infrastructure, data
quality processes, policies, people, and ongoing evaluation of the
efectiveness of data quality processes by a cross-functional team.
Why an Enterprise Architecture?
Today, organizations collect and store data as part of operational pro-
cesses. To ef ciently complete these processes, data must be of high
quality: valid, accurate, complete. Without knowing whether theses
standards are met, many organizations proceed to use this data in
downstream processes and business analysis, replicating inaccuracies in
other systems. The data, therefore, must be of high quality not only for
its original purpose, but for multiple purposes throughout its lifecycle.
To meet such needs companies require multi-use, rules-driven data
quality processes that provide consistent results at every place
where they are invoked. Further, as businesses change, as regula-
tions increase, as corporate standards are defned or modifed, inte-
grating these changes in respective data quality processes and rules
becomes a complex undertaking. A single place of administration
prevents the need to retroft a requirement change into multiple
processes using diferent technologies, and possibly outputting
varying results.
Importance of Options and Choice
When considering a data quality technical platform, the most impor-
tant criteria to evaluate is the degree to which you have options for
how you will integrate data quality processes into existing applications,
workfows, and processes in addition to any new systems being built.
This means that when implementing, growing, and changing your data
quality solution to meet changing business demands, you will not be
limited by technology nor locked into the vendors one way of solving a
challenge, which may not work best for your company.
Trillium Software Enterprise
Connectivity
Trillium Software ofers an industrial-strength
tool set that helps companies achieve Total
Data Quality through universal, enterprise
connectivity. Accurate, consistent, and valid
information can be delivered to any system or
application, regardless of wherever, however,
or whenever data enters the organization.

Trillium Software System has been uniquely
architected based on the premise that enter-
prise-wide data quality solutions must work
seamlessly with all platforms, in any applica-
tion, and should be able to integrate into any
technical environment. As a result, our single,
core product can be deployed in many difer-
ent ways, throughout the enterprise.
This approach ofers signifcant benefts:
Maintain a single instance of Trillium Software System
Leverage a standard (base) set of quality rules
Streamline development and deployment eforts
Support portability across platforms
Produce the same results across heterogeneous platforms,
regardless of how functions are invoked
Scale easily to grow with an organization and industry
Fit into any data movement architecture
While your immediate requirement may be to implement a data
quality solution that serves a single application, our product allows
you at any time to scale your solution across your enterprise: across
platforms, across applications, across geographies, as you work to-
wards a Total Data Quality solution. Know the investment you make
initially has been built to serve many other purposes seamlessly, giv-
ing you countless options as your technical environment and busi-
ness requirements change over time.
Trillium Software Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Trillium Software: Enterprise Connectivity
Enterprise Architecture Options and SOA
The Trillium Software System core engines improve data qual-
ity in both real-time and in batch. Uniquely, Trillium Software
System is architected to provide the same set of core functional-
ity in multiple ways throughout the enterprise, as needs dictate.
Once a data quality process is defned and a user is achieving de-
sired results, this same data quality process can be deployed into
production as a Service and can be made accessible through a
number of diferent calling mechanisms. These calling mecha-
nisms include those you see diagramed to the left:
Requested as an on-demand batch process
Invoked as a scheduled batch job
Embedded within ETL workfows
Tightly coupled with a third-party enterprise application
Loosely coupled as a web service
Integrated through open standards APIs
Trillium Software System is architected to, at any time, meet the
needs of organizations moving towards a Service Oriented Ar-
chitecture (SOA), ofering a scalable, fexible data quality plat-
form designed for high performance environments.
Product Architecture Details
The Trillium Software System core engines validate, cleanse,
standardize, and link international customer and business
information. Each engine has its own function and uses exter-
nal XML rules fles (available as text-based fles for mainframe
environments) that manage data sources, source layouts, and
quality processing rules. Like the core engines, these settings
fles can easily be ported and reused in any operating system or
environment.
Product architecture benefts include:
Consistent results across the enterprise
Minimal efort to migrate from platform to platform
Minimal efort to scale up or down
Seamless integration with data movement and data
validation processes
Easy to modify rules without changing the application
Consistent results are achieved across platforms because the same
external text-based setting fles and quality processing rules are
used by each process. Each project can have its
own set of rules as well, handling the difering
needs of divisions or departments within an
organization.
Please refer to the Trillium Software System
Product Overview for details about the prod-
uct functions. Read further to understand
how data quality functions can be deployed
throughout your enterprise.
Data Quality Application Server for Real
Time Applications
The Director, shown in the diagram to the left,
is an application server that provides data qual-
ity processing to multiple applications in a high
availability environment. The Director is ideal
for deploying data quality within legacy sys-
tems (e.g. written in C, COBOL, RPG, etc.), mixed
or heterogeneous environments, web-based
applications, and networked applications. It
is the best option for organizations that have
more than one system that requires data qual-
ity processing in real-time.
The Director manages the data quality services
deployed across the network and regulates traf-
fc between calling applications and the cleans-
ing and matching servers. This highly-scalable
architecture means your data quality services can
keep up with your growing data quality require-
ments and with changing workloads.
The Director architecture is an infnitely scal-
able, high-performance, network-based imple-
mentation of TS Quality. The Director provides
the following services:
Transaction load-balancing
Statistical report management
Server processes management
Multi-threading
Trillium Software: Enterprise Connectiivity
Centralized or Distributed?
Because of its unique architecture, Trillium
Software System supports both a centralized
data quality environment (where a single
instance and a single version of quality pro-
cessing rules prevails for all systems, plat-
forms, and environments) and a distributed
data quality environment (where more than
a single instance and more than a single ver-
sion of quality processing rules are used with-
in your enterprise). Depending on the needs
and policies within your organization, one of
these architectures may be preferred. Your
needs will not be limited by the software.
Are Web Services the Best Option?
For some customers, web services ofer the
perfect option for an enterprise-wide data
quality solution. For many others, however,
web services ofer the right solution for only
a subset of their overall data quality deploy-
ment needs. And still for others, web services
do not suf ciently meet their performance
requirements at all.
Web services can be a great way to fulfll a
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy,
which is why it is one of the options Trillium
Software provides. However, as mentioned
earlier in this piece, make sure you have more
than one option available to you to meet your
organizations needs so you are not locked
into only one way of doing things.
Trillium Software ofers strategic services that
assist clients with defning the optimal solu-
tion, given the business needs, the technical
requirements, and interoperability with other
applications.
Evaluation Criteria for Options and Choice
In order to better understand the degree to which a given ven-
dor ofers the right mix of choice and options for your organiza-
tion, ask the following questions:
Does the vendor ...
Ofer both tightly- and loosely-coupled integration options to
your major operational systems (e.g., ERP, sales/orders, CRM,
CDI, billing, fnance, etc.)?
Support the primary operating systems run in your
organization, particularly for key applications?
Supply functionality that allows users to defne very specifc
rules and standards, when required?
Provide the ability to easily modify rules over time?
Deliver native support for all geographies you require?
Allow for more than one way to solve any major challenge?
Most importantly, fnd out if deploying data quality processes in
diferent ways will require diferent products, unique solutions,
or multiple components laced together as opposed to a single
platform that allows you to leverage work done for one environ-
ment into another, regardless of platform, application, process,
etc. The answer will have major implications on maintaining
data quality processes over time.
Harte-Hanks Trillium Software
www.trilliumsoftware.com
Corporate Headquarters
+ 1 (978) 436-8900
trilliumsoftware@trilliumsoftware.com
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