CIF

Source :  Information Management Magazine, December 1999 Claudia Imhoff

The Corporate Information Factory (CIF) is a logical architecture whose purpose is to deliver business intelligence and business management capabilities driven by data provided from business operations. The CIF has proven to be a stable and enduring technical architecture for any size enterprise desiring to build strategic and tactical decision support systems (DSSs). The CIF consists of producers of data and consumers of information. Figure 1 shows all the components found within the Corporate Information Factory architecture.

Business Operations:

Are the family of systems ( e.g Operational, reporting, ERP) from which the rest of the CIF inherits its characteristics. These are the core operational systems that run the day-to-day business processes and that are accessed usually through Application Program Interfaces (APIs). The success or failure of CIF depends heavily on these operational systems to supply the richness in data needed to understand customers and to provide the history needed to judge the health of business.

Business Intelligence:

BI consists of the ability to analyze data and information used in strategic decision support. These systems are major consumers of data and are composed of various BI applications as well as the repository of historical data from which these applications are created. The main components of BI are the data warehouse, data marts, data delivery and decision support interfaces ( DSI), and the processes for “getting data in” and “getting information out.” The data marts, Exploration warehouse and Data mining warehouse are the subsets  or derived collections of the data found in the  data warehouse, formatted for their particular function or department.

Business Management:

Business Management enables  corporation to act in a tactical fashion upon the intelligence obtained from the strategic decision support systems. Operational Data Store (ODS) is considered a major consumer of operational data. The sources are same one we use for BI, except that in this case the data form the operational systems updates the ODS. The old data is overwritten by the new data and little or or no history is retained, the history is stored in data warehouse. Thus, the ODS is an integrated, cleaned, dynamic(or updatable), and the current set of data for these tactical decision making activities.The ODS is accessible from anywhere in the organization and should not support any single operational application.