Leveraging Master Data Management as a Tool for DW Consolidation

Apr 23, 2013 by David Loshin

In the past few postings we looked at some of the issues that emerge as a result of uncontrolled creation of data warehouses and data marts. I suggested that the goals of a data warehouse consolidation project should not only include the creation of a new data asset that accommodates the users of the “to-be-consolidated” warehouses and marts, but that those systems should be retired and replaced by the new asset.

Facing Maturity: Devaluing your Data Warehouse – No History

May 22, 2012 by Joyce Norris-Montanari

Do you just do reporting in the data warehouse?  You know the type of reporting that ONLY looks at the most current information.  If so, then you may be devaluing the data warehouse.  Here is how:

Is MDM for Everyone?

Mar 21, 2011 by Joyce Norris-Montanari

With all the industry buzz about MDM lately, the question that begs an answer is: Is MDM for everyone? 

One More Thing…

Dec 16, 2010 by Phil Simon

The traditional technical-functional disconnect continues to plague many organizations. It drives quasi-developers like me a little nuts when some of my clients hit me with last-minute changes. Typically, they’ll say something along the lines of, “We just need to add (insert item) now” or “There’s just one more thing.”

Ah….those three words.

70-80%

Nov 09, 2010 by David Loshin

ETL accounts for 70-80% of the effort of building a data warehouse. We all know this – it is conventional wisdom, and is a metric used many places to justify the use of data integration tools for business intelligence projects. But where did this estimate come from?

The “70-80%” is commonly used. In about 10 minutes invested so far on Google, I found:

A blog entry from 2009,

an article reference from 2004,

a 2002 article from the UK Operations Research Society,

one of my own articles from 2003,

various tool vendors going as far back as 1997,

and numerous other citations. But where is this estimate from? And more interestingly, is it valid today?

Analysis without a Monitoring Tool

May 24, 2010 by Joyce Norris-Montanari

I was just chatting with a friend on Email about his situation with a HUGE data warehouse.  It seems that there was so much invested in the enterprise data warehouse, that utilities that monitor the queries and balance the load on the platform are not in the budget for this year.  After the threats of me sending him an invoice, I came up with a way for him to determine what is going on, and how to fix it! Here are my thoughts:

1. Determine if the front-end reporting/analytics tool has a governor built into it.  It would be an option in the administration portion of the software.  If it has a governor, make setting that a priority for each report user.

Data Modeling for BI (Business Intelligence)

Mar 29, 2010 by Joyce Norris-Montanari

I was having lunch with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and she told me she like data modeling for data warehouses because it was so easy. I thought about this for a while, and decided that data modeling for business intelligence or a data warehouse initiative could be accomplished differently, based on the circumstances. For example:

1. If the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is already complete, and the data is available. Then data modeling would be very physical, and require creating new data marts, based on the business requirements.

MDM and the Data Warehouse

Aug 04, 2009 by Joyce Norris-Montanari

Who Feeds Who?

I was recently at our local DAMA user group meeting in the Rocky Mountain area. (www.dama.org) We were discussing Master Data Management (MDM), and a best practice for integration into the enterprise. From the discussion it was obvious that most people thought you should create master data in the following order:

Scorecards!

Jun 23, 2009 by Joyce Norris-Montanari

You know everyone has a scorecard! Really! We have scorecards for data quality, security, compliance, job performance, etc. A scorecard is defined as a card used to report the scores of a sports contest. Hmmm how do I use that in information technology? We could say that a score card is used to report a rating. That would apply to all the scorecards listed above. So what is a balanced scorecard? A balanced scorecard is an analysis technique to translate goals and strategy into something that is quantifiable. You could go so far as to say that these scores could be compared to industry standards or industry best practices. So creating the scorecard or comparison mechanism once seems to be a pretty organized and comprehensive approach to compare a company in a specific vertical. But, how do I compare them over time?