Jeet Kumar is the administrator of data warehousing at a big regional bank. He was appointed 5 years ago to implement a data warehouse to support the bank’s CRM business strategy. Using the data warehouse, the bank has been successful in integrating customer information, understanding customer profitability, attracting customers, enhancing customer relationships, and retaining customers.

Over the years, the bank’s data warehouse has moved closer to real time by moving to more frequent refreshes of the data warehouse. Now, the bank wants to implement customer self-service and call center applications that require even fresher data than is currently available in the warehouse.

Jeet wants some support in considering the possibilities for presenting fresher data. One alternative is to entirely commit to implementing RDW. His ETL vendor is prepared to assist him make this change. Nevertheless, Jeet has been informed about EAI and EII technologies and wonders how they might fit into his plans.

In particular, he has the following questions:

a. What exactly are EAI and EII technologies?

b. How are EAI and EII related to ETL?

c. How are EAI and EII related to RDW?

d. Are EAI and EII required, complementary, or alternatives to RDW?

Help Jeet answer these questions. (This exercise was adapted from Brobst, S., Levy, E., & Muzilla, C. (2005, Spring). Enterprise application integration and enterprise information integration. Business Intelligence Journal, 10(2), 27–33.)