The compliance operational data store

On SearchCompliance.com, John Weathington argues for using what you’ve got and against reinventing the wheel when architecting for compliance:

“Classical business intelligence architecture contains three fundamental components: an enterprise data warehouse, an operational data store, and any number of data marts. These are the salient pieces of what data warehousing expert Bill Inmon calls a corporate information factory. If your organization doesn’t already have these pieces in place, it certainly should have the talent that understands these concepts and can construct them.

You need to leverage this corporate intellectual property instead of trying to design a new set of architectural frameworks. Think of compliance as a strategic function, and view the current data in your organization as vital input to this strategy that will be properly transformed to support your strategic goals of compliance.

In the same way your operational data store unifies your data into entities that represent the “single source of the truth,” a compliance operational data store can unify your compliance data for operational compliance intelligence. On any given day, a compliance operational data store can tell you the state of compliance for any area of the company’s concern.”