By Karen Lopez on Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:52:47 GMT

A recent ITWorld Canada article by Kathleen Lau discusses Bank of Montreal's Data Governance approach.  Of note are a couple of quotes:

And, said Livesley, “to get trusted information, you need to know where it comes from, what it means, and what has been done to it. You need all those things for a successful business intelligence implementation.”

While we data management professionals understand this, it seems that our application project-driven work reinforces an opposite goal - just get me a lot of data and put it in "my" system as fast as you can.  Don't worry about quality or having a single source of the truth -- I need to define my own truth about the business to meet my needs.

At any rate, the more there exists a drive for enterprise information in order to report or better serve customers, appropriate standards and controls on the data is the way to go, said Livesley.

I've also noticed an increased interest by "regular IT shops" to better manage data and information from a higher quality, enterprise point of view.  Not just at banks and insurance companies (normally the first to embrace progressive IT strategies, but at other types of organizations, even SMBs.

Is this a trend?

Bank of Montreal spends time on data governance > Data Warehousing

 

By Karen Lopez on Monday, October 27, 2008 2:40 PM

Greg Keller of Embarcadero Technologies has posted information about a webinar happening Wednesday, 29 October at 10 AM PDT / 1 PM PDT.  This webinar features Greg and Bruce Baum of Siemens:

The Energy sector is undergoing tremendous growth in all areas: from daily operations to supply the growing demand for energy to its consumer base, to the research and development of sustainable alternative energy sources our planet can rely on. The increased research brings with it unprecedented requirements on data and the systems required to manage it and turn it into actionable and reliable information.

To manage all this, Siemens Energy—a global leader in renewable, sustainable solutions for efficient energy creation and transmission—has heavily invested in its data architecture strategy.

Please join us for Refining Data - Data Modeling Challenges in the Energy Industry with Bruce Baum, Siemens Energy Global Data Architect, and Greg Keller, Embarcadero Technologies Chief Evangelist, as they discuss the global data and information management challenges facing the energy sector. Learn how refined data modeling and metadata practices, tools, and global communication play a substantial role in increased productivity, better systems integration, and higher data quality for companies of every size.

SPACE IS LIMITED

You can follow the link below to register.

:....:Meta Frequency:....:: Webinar! Refining Data - Data Modeling Challenges in the Energy Industry

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 2:52 PM

Here's your chance to attend an online, virtual conference with the Data Management industry's leading speakers and trainers.

I will be presenting on Enterprise Data Management: 7 Mistakes You Can't Afford to Make on Friday, November 7, 2008 at 2 PM Eastern.

If you can't make that time slot, don't worry, all the sessions are being recorded so that you can view them when it makes sense for you.

And the best part?  If you are a DAMA Member, registration is FREE.  If you aren't an active DAMA member, registration is $95 USD. 

The 2008 DAMA-NCR/Wilshire Symposium (will be delivered online in a webcast format.  The conference will be hosted by the National Capital Region Chapter of the Data Management Association (DAMA-NCR) and Wilshire Conferences.

This year's Symposium will be delivered as a concentrated series of webcasts, for both live and on-demand viewing.  Numerous presentations are scheduled each day during the week of November 3-7, 2008. Check out the entire agenda HERE.

Participants from around the world will be able to receive each webcast as it is being presented (maximum 200 participants per live presentation), or come back later to view an archived version. DAMA members from around the world are granted access to the entire online conference at no charge, while non-members will pay a $95 fee.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Leveraging Information Asset Management.”

We are covering topics of interest to both private industry and government organizations at a variety of audience levels including business executive, entry level practitioner, and advanced practitioner.

Sign up today and enjoy the fact that you won't have to make your way to the airport, deal with security checks, late planes, or bad coffee. Just sit back and let the speakers come to you, in your own environment.

 

By Karen Lopez on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 9:33 AM

Our next speaker is from a large international software vendor, speaking about implementing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) based on the ARTS SOA Blueprint.

His most interesting points:

• Reasons to go with a SOA approach -- Reuse, Getting information to people at the right time, connectivity beyond boundaries of the business, improved processes, combining complex data from a variety of sources.
• He gave an overview of some sample services designed in swimlane process models as part of the ARTS SOA Blueprint.

The ARTS SQA blueprint is available free to ARTS members and for a small fee for non-members.  It includes typical retail business processes as well as a SOA tutorial and SOA reference architecture.

By Karen Lopez on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 7:29 AM

Our speaker now is from a large software vendor who is speaking about using ARTS Standards to build large, scalable BI & Analytics solutions in the retail environment.

He is giving a background on how the ARTS Data Model has been used to develop the ARTS Data Warehouse / BI model.

His next section focused on what will be happening in ARTS DW 2.0, due out next summer.

The most interesting part of his presentation was a static demonstration of a partner organization's vendor product based on the ARTS DW 1.0 Data Model.  I've seen this product before and I love the user interface.  It's clean, modern, and bright.  I believe if one is designing decision support systems for business users, the interface should be beautiful and helpful.  Unfortunately, so many IT projects are forced to use the default interface design of their development tools for budgetary reasons.

This DW vendor has also developed Mobile and Vista Widgets that connect to the BI systems.  So end users can access store performance data from their desktops, their browsers, or their mobile phones.

He also has a great graphic that shows that 80% of the project effort is typically focused on the development of the ETL and data base design deliverables, but 80% of the business value from BI systems tends to come from great reporting and presentation functions.  So we in IT are shortchanging our business users by not spending enough on the usability of BI systems.