By Karen Lopez on Wednesday, June 20, 2007 1:49 PM

I just finished a whitepaper sponsored by Embarcadero Technologies on Collaborating with Developers and DBAs: 7 Easy Steps to an Easier Project, Better Product, and Stronger Team .  Registration is required.

In this paper, I discuss seven ways you can improve the performance of your teams, specifically with the technical users of your models.  I believe that we data and process architects are so swamped with work that we forget that in addition to the business, we have developers and DBAs as users, not just consumers, of our modeling deliverables. 

In addition, I've developed a presentation on this topic -- see my blog post prior to this one.  If you are interested in having me present on this topic at your company or at your local user group, please contact me at website@infoadvisors.com . I'd love to come visit.

I would appreciate feedback on this paper and presentation.  What did I miss?  Am I wrong on some of these?  In your experience, would these steps work?  Would your boss let you follow them?  Have you implemented these types of things?

Opinions, for or against, awaited.

 

By Karen Lopez on Monday, June 18, 2007 8:20 PM

On Tuesday 26 June 2007, I will be speaking at the Portland Oregon DAMA Chapter on Collaborating with Techs: Performance Improvement with Developers and DBAs.  This is a brand new presentation I've developed and Portland DAMA has been kind enough to be the first audience to see it.

So if you are in the Portland or Vancouver WA area, I'd love to get your input into the presentation.

I'm also giving my "Everything I know about Data Management I Learned from Amazon.com / Powells.com one that's a lot of fun.

See announcement below

Hope to see you there

Karen  speaking at DAMA Portland on 26 June 2007

        
Next Meeting:  Tuesday June 26th , 2007    
Subject

Working with Techies: Better Collaboration with Developers and DBAs

Karen Lopez

Schedule

 8:30 – 9:00 a.m.    Sign-in /coffee and pastries
 9:00 – 11:00 a.m.   Presentation

11:00 - 11:30 a.m.   Chapter News/Announcements

Where

Con-way

2055 NW Savier St

Portland, OR 97209

There is free parking at Con-way

Cost

Free for members!
$15 for non-members.
See the list of corporate members.

RSVP

E-mail VP-Communication by Thursday, June 21st

Abstract

Working with Techies: Better Collaboration with Developers and DBAs

An interactive workshop on increasing collaboration with developers, DBAs, and other technical IT staff.   Topics will include:

·       Working with the new generation of IT workers
·       Location, location, location
·       Throwing models over the wall
·       Resolving differences of opinion
·       Architecture versus model versus design
·       Proactive versus reactive methods
·       Removing obstacles to success
·       Building Trust
·       Each attendee will take away a portfolio of techniques and checklists for having easier projects, better products, and faster tasks.

 

I Learned Everything I Need To Know About Data Modeling from Amazon.com: An Overview of Really Useful Books that Aren't About Data Modeling    

Karen shares her passion in reading by giving an overview of really useful books for data architects who want to be:

·       Great team members
·       Well positioned in the workplace
·       Great communicators
·       Better Analysts
·       Attendees will also get the opportunity to nominate their favorite books.

Speaker

Bio

Speaker: Karen Lopez

Karen Lopez is a principal consultant at InfoAdvisors, Inc., a Toronto-based consulting firm. She has 20 years of experience in project and data management on large, multi-project programs.  She specializes in the practical application of data management principles. 

Karen is  frequent speaker at DAMA chapters and conferences around the world.  Her sessions are well attended and receive great reviews.  She is often invited to return to speak again on new topics.

She has been a speaker for:

§       DAMA Australia
§       DAMA MN*
§       DAMA Portland*
§       DAMA San Francisco
§       DAMA UK
§       IRMAC (Toronto)*
§       Albany EMUG
§       Dallas EMUG
§       New York City EMUG*

*Multiple events

Karen is a former president of the Information Resource Management Association of Canada (IRMAC), and was the 2006 recipient of the Gary Hadford Professional Achievement Award.  She is also the ListMistress and moderator of the InfoAdvisors Discussion Groups at www.infoadvisors.com.  

By Karen Lopez on Monday, June 18, 2007 9:57 AM

IBM and Telelogic have announced a cash offer to purchase Telelogic AB, current owner of [former]ly Popkin] Systems Architect:

Popkin’s software, System Architect, is used for modeling enterprise systems, IT infrastructures or indeed an entire enterprise’s business processes. Though it supports unified modeling language (UML) - which is also the developers’ modeling standard adopted by Telelogic and competitors that include IBM/Rational, Borland, Compuware, Oracle and others - its software is aimed more at business users than applications developers.

Popkin’s software is said to be adopted primarily by business users, who use System Architect to map out their business processes, in order that they might audit, manage and streamline them.

If this sale goes through, this could lead to a signficant change in the types of systems development methods that work with UML and Rational.  While the Telelogic suite of modeling and applications development tools already supports multiple rows and columns of the Zachman Framwork, IBM's Rational suite of products have primarily focused on only the last two rows of coding and implementing.  If IBM does what it should do and properly integrates (not just interfaces) Systems Architect and the Rational suite, development teams may now have the set of mature IBM-owned tools to complete analysis, design, and testing deliverables. 

Another perk of this acquisition may be that more-local support will be provided.  Telelogic is located in Sweden and many of our customers in North America have struggled with getting timely support to urgent issues due to the time difference.

The downside, as I see it, is that the ongoing consolidation of modeling tool ownership is going to lead to fewer tool options for modelers.

Either way, I believe that if IBM steps up and re-architects the Rational Suite to support true model-driven, full Zachman row and column integration with their products, organizations will benefit a great deal from this significant change to what have been developer techie-only coding tools that have diagramming front ends.

InfoAdvisors is an IBM and Telelogic partner.

By Karen Lopez on Monday, June 18, 2007 9:39 AM

CA's ERwin Product Manager Danny Sandwell was interviewed by eChannelLine's Patricia Pickett on CA's plans to sell ERwin Data Modeler soley through third party channels:

However, beginning with its fiscal year this April, CA made the conscious decision to change that sales model. "Our plan is to make this 100 per cent available through the channel," Sandwell said. All of the large enterprise accounts will be handed over to the channel, and partners will also get the associated contract renewals, providing an "automatic boom" for those that have stuck by CA, he said. CA's inside sales team, which formerly generated leads and closed some sales if the customer did not specify a preferred partner, will now focus solely on lead generation, passing over all opportunities to the channel.

"This is one of the efforts CA is making in support of expanding and improving its leverage of the channel and its partnership with the channel," Sandwell continued. There are already a number of smaller VARs out there whose operations are "completely and solely based on providing value-added services around ERwin itself," and this will serve to enhance their businesses, he said.

This means that instead of purchasing ERwin directly from CA, you'll need to purchase through a distributor or VAR.   CA has previously had programs in place to encourage CA sales staff to forward leads to CA Partners, so many of our clients are already purchasing ERwin and the entire modeling suite through other organzations.

For now purchases of ERwin Data Modeler and the entire modeling suite can still be made through store.ca.com, but it appears that only ERwin Data Modeler 7.1 is available there.

InfoAdvisors is a CA partner.

By Karen Lopez on Monday, June 11, 2007 3:19 PM

A recording of the ER/Studio ERSIG recent meeting has been posted.   This meeting included two presentations:

Presentation 1: "Online Macro Creation--Event Handling" by Oktay Amiry, ER/Studio Technical Lead, North America Support Presentation 2: "The Repository Meta Model", by Jason Tiret, ER/Studio Product Manager

 

In addition, we have posted a zip file all the macros from Oktay Amiry's presentation, plus a few more.

 

Please visit the User Groups page on the Embarcadero Technologies web site to download the above as well as presentations from previous ERSIG meetings.

 

http://www.embarcadero.com/resources/usergroups.html

 

NOTE: NO recording key is required to view the recording.

 

By Karen Lopez on Monday, June 11, 2007 1:37 PM

As far as I can tell, the UML standard does not provide guidance for creating traceable logical and physical data models.  By traceable, I mean the ability to have separate models which are linked in a way that allows a modeler to trace from either direction where a modeling object is used in either model.

So this begs the question:

If UML tools support only a single row in the Zachman framework at a time, which one? 

I'm guessing that theoretically the answer could be:

Whichever one you want it to support....

In my experience, though, UML models are prepared solely for a physical view of a specific system/application.  I'm not writing about what the standard says, but how these standards are applied in real life.

Could it be that these models reflect the rows in which most developers work? Or is it something inherent in the modeling techniques themselves?  And what about Conceptual models?  Or any of the other rows in the Framework?

 

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 6:04 PM

Following up on my recent blog entry about gender differences and the acrid backlash I get when I make media appearances on the topic, a recent article in the Globe and Mail covers a study done by the University of Chicago.  In this study, women are divided into two groups and one is told they are being tested on math skills, while the other group was told that they were being tested on why men do better at math than women. 

The women who were told they were being tested on why men are better than women at math had only 80% accuracy on the test, down from 90% in their pretest.

The women reported being distracted by thoughts such as: "I thought about how boys are usually better than girls at math, so I was trying harder not make mistakes"

Among women not given the stereotype message, performance improved slightly  After the math test, the women were also given a standard memory test and it was found that women exposed to the stereotyping also did less well there.

It made me think back to the computer science chair of a university CS program who told me, flat out, that if he were forced to admit more women to his program he'd have to dumb it down so much that no one would be able to even log in.  I wonder what messages he sends to the few female students dumb enough to take his courses?

Oh, and if you are male and think that this story isn't of interest to you, you may want to put your hands on a copy of this article the lead researcher has written:

Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2005). When high-powered people fail: Working memory and “choking under pressure” in math. Psychological Science, 16, 101-105.

I think that one sounds interesting, too.

Don't worry, be happy....

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 3:41 PM

I once made such a stupid mistake for a client that it almost cost the client well into the million dollars range.  It was early in my career and I was working for a consulting firm that had a client in litigation.  Their was a large volume of test data that needed to be entered into a database, then about 3,000 graphs needed to be plotted.  It took a long time, but only because there was a great deal of data entry to be done.  Easy as cake! 

Except that I didn't really check my work that carefully, and the graphs all ended up having a duplicate data point at the end.  Every single one of them had an extra data point.  Even those of you without an inner Matlock can see that these graphs weren't going to work in court.  But I didn't find the mistake, my boss did.  And he couldn't find me (this was before cellphones), so he had to track down another programmer from another company to reproduce the graphs based on the data.

So I ponied up the money to pay for the impromptu programmer, swallowed my pride (not that there was any left), apologized, and wrote up a test plan procedure that included external reviews of test data long before the next court date.  When I ran into my former boss years later, I mentioned that I was still embarrassed by that mistake.  Either he was being very kind to me or he was the forgiving type, because he said he didn't remember it at all.

I'm walking down memory lane because a cleaning service owner is going to show up at our home tonight we fired our last service.  My having to go through the time it takes to tell someone what we require, then training their staff on what we want is just a pain.  But we have to do it because we fired our last cleaning service.

I just can't help thinking how this must be how managers feel when they have to fire an employee that isn't working out.  He knows he has to do it, but it takes longer to fire someone and hire a new person that it does to keep picking up the slack of the...slacker.  So on and on it goes, with the manager getting more and more frustrated trying to mentor the worker into doing the right thing and the slacker getting worse and worse at his job because he's being asked to do something he isn't capable of doing.  I'm betting that for most managers of a poorly performing workers, a person who is bad at making mistakes is the one that will get fired first.

So while I am looking forward to having a cleaning service again, I'm dreading the whole process of finding one that fits, then managing the staff while they are here.  It's hard for me to clean, though, when I'm on the road so much, so hiring in it is.

Our last cleaners, Merry Maids of Scarborough, started out nice enough, but it went down hill from there, fast.  We gave both the owner of the franchise and her staff written instructions.  Included in the instructions were large print, bolded warnings about something that would be damaged by contact with any water.   So the first team we had kept water away from the sensitive item.  However, just like an outsourced development team, turnover on the cleaning team was high.  Not long into our contract, staff started changing on a weekly basis, so I had to jump in to do training...then I had to keep an eye on the team because I found that they were leaving water all over the bolded, large print warned item.  I had a short meeting "No water, at all on this.  Do not put any water on this.  If you accidentally put water on it, dry it up immediately.  Carry a towel so that you can."  Nods of agreement, and on with the work.

But the next week the team was new again, and I had to repeat my dire warnings. And yet a newer team the following week.  I felt as if I was stuck in a wash, rinse, repeat cycle.  I called the owner to tell her that she was letting here staff damage our items.  I had noticed that in addition to the water issue, their use of a specialized device was leaving large chunks of paint and drywall out of our walls.  Large, one inch dents and chunks in our walls.    All at exactly the height of this device, which just happened to have square corners, right at the same level of the chunks missing from our walls.

In addition, I found that the cleaning agent used on our furniture was removing the finish on our furniture and then being transferred to all of our mirrors as new, under-trained staff was mixing rag use on all kinds of surfaces.

So I'd had enough and called the owner of Merry Maids of Scarborough.  Her husband took the call and I shared my frustrations.  He was very understanding and knew exactly what caused the perfect triangle shaped holes in our walls, what cleaning agent the staff were using incorrectly, and what was causing furniture finish to end up on our mirrors and windows.  He arranged to come visit to take photos for his insurance company...and I was happy.

Well, I thought I was happy.  Mr. Merry Maid did not come out -- he sent one of the same cleaning staff people who had damaged the home.  After the staff person looked at the perfectly shaped triangles spotting our walls, the perfectly concentric circles of water damage from a wet bucket left for hours where it shouldn't have been, splashes of water left too long on our finished wood, and the hardened swirls of cleaning agent and furniture finishing on our expensive mirrors, she declared that all was damage from our cat.

What?

If our cat could may perfectly circular, concentric circles in a wooden finish, I'd be putting her on show.  If she could punch perfectly triangular holes in our walls, I'd rent her out for art shows.  If she could some how work with furniture finish, I'd work her day and night refinishing our floors.

Yes, it turns out that the teams of untrained staff at Merry Maids Scarborough were incapable of doing any of this damage, but some how, our cat was.

So we fired them.  Not because they damaged our walls, our furniture, our mirrors, our floors, but because they didn't know how to deal with their making a mistake -- they weren't good at making mistakes. 

Sure, we all make them...me, I've made some real doozies.  Some of them were even pretty darn stupid mistakes.  Some where unforgivable.  Some make for a good story and not much else.

When my team members make a mistake, I want them to do it well.  I want them to:

• Find out that they made a mistake long before I do
• Figure out how to fix it
• Fix it, even if it means staying late, missing dinner, or missing a movie
• Make a checklist, tool, or process that will keep them from making the same or similar mistakes in the future.
• Ask others how to keep from making the same mistake again
• Say they are sorry they made a mistake (not "I'm sorry you are mad" or "I'm sorry that guy told you about my mistake" or "Your cat did it, not me.)

How could I trust a company like Merry Maids of Scarborough to send staff to my home if they had no clue what caused the damage and had no interest in fixing it, and then wanted to blame it on the cat?  And just how stupid did they think I was when they said my cat had all these wonderful talents?  How could they let their staff tell me that "I don't have to follow any thing you put in writing".?  How could they send the person who caused the damage to assess whether they did the damage?  Trust them? They don't know for trust.

And not only did I not trust them any longer, now perhaps you don't, either. I've worked with lots of bad service firms over the years, and the only ones I can remember the names of where people who didn't know how to fully fix their mistakes.  Maybe you'll remember that Merry Maids of Scarborough thinks our cat is a wizard of some sort, but probably you'll remember that they didn't want to fix their msitakes.

If you've made a mistake, the first thing you must do it admit it, fix it, keep it from happening again, and say you are sorry.  If you do that, nearly everyone you work with will either forget that the mistake happened at all or who did it.  And some time a few years in the future, you'll be sitting around in a pub, telling others about this great story and how well it ended. 

Trust me.

 

By Karen Lopez on Sunday, May 27, 2007 10:30 PM

 

How do you print an ERwin model to PDF?

Well, if you are running the current version of CA ERwin Data Modeler, you can easily product PDFs from the Report Builder window.  Just choose the proper format when you get to the template window, as shown below.  In fact, we have a video tutorial right here at InfoAdvisors.com that shows you how to produce a report, with images, of your data models.  Just visit our Articles and Videos page via the tabs above to see all our CA ERwin r7 videos.

But what do you do if you are currently using an older version of ERwin?

I recommend that you either get your hands on a copy of Adobe Acrobat if you have many PDF publishing needs.  If you budget and needs are more simple, I recommend you try CutePDF, which is freeware - no charge.:

Create PDF documents on the fly — for Free!
 
Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for the secure and reliable distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world.  CutePDF Writer (formerly CutePDF Printer) is the free version of commercial PDF creation software. CutePDF Writer installs itself as a "printer subsystem". This enables virtually any Windows applications (must be able to print) to create professional quality PDF documents - with just a push of a button!
 
FREE for personal and commercial use!  No watermarks!  No Popup Web Ads!

We have been using CutePDF for more than 5 years and I can vouch for the no spyware, no ads, no junk included install.  This is not ad-supported, nag where, or even charityware.  It's just a great, valuable tiny app that works.

CutePDF works like a little imaginary printer that instead of printing to paper, prints to a PDF on your hard drive.  So instead of going to report builder, you only need to go to FILE / PRINT SETUP to choose the CutePDF writer from your list of printers.

 

 

 See, it looks just like a printer on your print dialog.

After you have filled in these options, CutePDF will prompt you for a name and location for your new PDF file and you are done.

The great think about using CutePDF is that it work anywhere in Windows where you can print.  So if you want, you can use it with ER/Studio, Excel, Word...everywhere there's a print function, you can print to a PDF.

It works with any print capable application - at least we haven't found an application where it doesn't work.

I think that CutePDF is a valuable addition to your personal and professional toolkit.

Check it out.

By Karen Lopez on Sunday, May 27, 2007 10:04 PM

What is Visible Analyst and Visible Advantage?

InfoAdvisors.com offers two Visible System's related discussion groups for users of Visible Systems' Visible Analyst and Visible Advantage.

Visible Analyst is a modeling tool offered by Visible Systems, Inc. at visible.com .  This tools supports data, process, and UMl modeling, as well as the Zachman Framework, as you can see from the screen shot on the left.

Visible Analyst supports modeling from strategic planning through working with databases.  It supports ERDs, Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs), Functional Decompositions, Structure Charts, Class Modeling, State Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, Collaboration Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams, Use Case Diagrams,

It includes sub-modeling, an extensible repository, conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling, simple versioning, and change control.

Visible.com offers a free trial download, as well as pricing and licensing information.  Of note, all licenses are floating, meaning that a license is not tied to a user or machine.  Also, Visible offers very attractive academic licensing. 

Visible Advantage and Universal Data Models

Visible.com also offers Visible Advantage, another multi-level, multi model tool.  You may also purchase a Universal Data Model edition that comes with template or pattern data models .

InfoAdvisors can assist you in evaluating modeling tools to meet your specific needs and environment.