TUTORIALS • 1 November 2004

META DATA TUTORIALS

ENTERPRISE METADATA: DISCOVERING THE SECRETS OF CREATING LASTING VALUE

R. Todd Stephens Technical Director of the Metadata Services Group BellSouth

This tutorial focuses on the formulation and implementation of an enterprise metadata strategy. The Metadata Services Group within BellSouth has spent the last 5 years developing an enterprise metadata solution based on a solid product line and a customer service focus. This tutorial will develop the attendees understanding of how to develop a successful enterprise metadata implementation. We will examine the principles of marketing, selling strategies, service offerings, product design, architecture, team construction and overall strategy of delivery for an enterprise metadata solution in both the structured and un-structured world.

Come see why BellSouth, won the Outstanding Enterprise Meta Data Implementation last year at the 2003 DAMA Symposium and Wilshire Conference. Develop an understanding why other attendees are making comments like:

“After seeing the Enterprise Repository presentation, I can say that BellSouth has the best collection of repositories I have ever seen.”
“Phenomenal, simply phenomenal”
“Amazing and inspiring”
“I have never seen anyone do so much with Metadata”
“This is the best Metadata presentation I have ever seen”
“I certainly learned a lot and am impressed with what you are doing at your company.”
"Fantastic presenter. He deserves a score of 12 on a 1 to 10 continuum."

Attendees will learn the following:

• Increase your understanding of which strategy options make the most sense and which do not
• Identify and compare your organizations metadata strategy with ours.
• Recognize which products, architecture and services can create a competitive advantage
• Enhance your ability to market and sell enterprise metadata
• Learn how to put a metadata business case together

XML FOR DATA MANAGERS - AN INTRODUCTION

Peter Aiken Founding Director VCU/Data Blueprint

XML has evolved from an interesting to a necessary capability. Focusing on practical/easily implemented capabilities, this long running seminar teaches solution designers/technology managers how best to implement XML – strategically – while complimenting/assisting ongoing data management (DM) activities. Delegates learn how to design XML-based solutions that leverage synergies with "best" DM practices. Delegates will:

• Understand the basic theories and guidance to use when incorporating XML into DM solutions – understanding the practical and effective
• Appreciate the many ways that the XML component architecture can be used to leverage DM solution efforts
• Learn from several examples of XML-based solutions
  

ADVANCED XML-BASED DATA MANAGEMENT

Peter Aiken Founding Director VCU/Data Blueprint

Building on the morning session, afternoon brings an examination of how XML framework technologies can play a role in solution design. The class next examines XML-based design pattern solutions focusing on XML & data engineering/DM technologies enterprise application integration (EAI), and XML-based portal capabilities. The session wraps up with a look at XML & the future of DM as we learn to embrace XML to a greater degree. Upon completion, delegates will:

• Comprehend the many complimentary characteristics between XML and best DM practices
• Grasp the general utilities to be gained from various XML frameworks and technologies
• Fathom the strengths/weakness of new XML-based DM techniques

INFORMATION QUALITY PRINCIPLES AND PROCESSES: FOUNDATION FOR IQ MANAGEMENT

Larry English President INFORMATION IMPACT International, Inc.

While organizations have for some time recognized the requirement for quality of products and services to be competitive, most are only now becoming aware of the problems in information quality and how poor information quality hurts both competitiveness and profits. Information quality management is not an academic exercise—it is a required tool for business performance excellence in the Information Age.
World-class companies apply the same quality principles, such as Deming’s Fourteen Points, Kaizen and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to information as a product of business process. This presentation addresses how these principles and techniques apply directly to information as a product and knowledge workers as information customers.

In this tutorial Mr English describes the fundamental principles of information quality. He describes how an organization can improve the quality and value of its information resources. He describes metrics for measuring information quality and management principles for implementing an effective information quality environment. Mr English describes how organizations have successfully implemented information quality processes to improve the effectiveness of their business and information system processes.

A. Principles and Processes of IQ Assessment: Information Quality Appraisal:

• Defining information quality: what IQ is and is not
• Information customers and information producers
• The information supply chain
• Metrics for information quality
• Assessing information quality
• Measuring the costs of poor quality information

B. Principles and Processes of IQ Improvement:

• Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) and IQ process improvement
• Quick wins and systemic improvements for information quality improvement and business effectiveness
• Principles for designing information quality

C. Principles and Processes of Culture Transformation: Creating an Environment for Sustainable Quality Information:

• The 14 Points of Information Quality
• How to start an information quality initiative
• Creating and sustaining change for business effectiveness through IQ management

DRIVE BUSINESS BENEFIT GROWTH? IMPROVE ROI? FOCUS ON IQ IMPROVEMENT!

		Dave Evans Senior Data Management Consultant BT Exact
		Dave Mills Senior Information Solutions Delivery Manager BT Exact

BT has achieved increasing ROI over the last three years by driving real business benefit through improving information quality in key business areas. It has developed a world leading information management capability for internal and external clients. But how did BT estimate how much poor information quality was costing it or would cost it if no action was taken? How did it subsequently measure how much money was saved, so proving the ROI? How did it determine the areas in which to invest? What risks did it take? How did it organize itself to deliver? The session will consider three main areas, Inventory management, ADSL Provisioning and Revenue Assurance. The session offers practical advice to IQ practitioners by focusing on:

• Measuring the cost of poor IQ in an enterprise business
• Where ROI has been achieved and the key measures used to justify it (capital avoidance, cost of failure)
• Homing in on the IQ hotspots that will generate the most ROI. The consultancy lead delivery approach
• Automating the analysis and the solutions—get it clean, keep it clean, do it cheap
• What went wrong and what we learned along the way

ENSURING GLOBAL ADDRESS QUALITY

Graham Rhind Proprietor GRC Database Information

An in-depth tutorial looking at managing international address data, including the problems involved in managing addresses and how they can be tackled.

• Ideal database structures for international data
• Processing issues: postal validation, standardization, casing, address language, punctuation etc.
• Improved data collection techniques for improved quality
• Postal code issues

WEB SERVICES: FROM SOAP TO BPEL

Rick van der Lans Managing Director R20/Consultancy

Many organizations are trying to integrate independent IT systems. On PowerPoint level integration looks easy, in real life it is hard. Web services have been introduced to ease the integration of systems by offering international standards. This tutorial presents a high-level overview of where we stand today with respect to web services. The standards and their interrelationships are discussed, plus the status of the market is explained. Which vendor is doing what? Are web services being used in real life, or is it still a dream?

Topics covered include:

• An overview of the complete web services standards stack, from SOAP to BPEL?
• What is the relationship between web services and business processes?
• With the BPEL standard business processes will be more explicit and therefore easier to change
• How well do the tools support web services today?
• What will integration do with security and how do web services help solve the problem?
• Auditing, logging and billing of web services with tools for web services management
• What are the differences between an service oriented architecture (SOA) and an application oriented architecture (AOA)

Half Day Tutorial
09:00-12:30

ACHIEVING DATA EXCELLENCE

		Larry Dziedzic President DAMA International
		Maggie O’Hara Assistant Professor of MIS East Carolina Universityt

One of the challenges facing information management professionals today is not only how to develop practical techniques to create more effective business solutions to data issues, but also how to effective sell their ideas to top management.

This tutorial will explain how a focus on data standards, data stewardship, governance and key performance indicators (KPIs) can lead to superior data (i.e. data excellence) at all levels of the organization and at all data life-cycle stages. Starting with an explanation of what data excellence is, the speakers identify why many previous initiatives have failed to achieve their desired objectives and why data management professionals may be focusing in the wrong place to achieve data excellence.

Continuing, they explain their holistic, life-cycle approach to data excellence, and demonstrate the appropriateness of data excellence initiatives at each life-cycle stage. Special emphasis is given to identifying the areas and processes within the organization that would benefit most from data standardization. Then, practical steps that can be taken to achieve an organization-wide focus on data stewardship and governance are presented. Finally, the presenters offer guidelines for how data excellence programs can be developed, and how they can be managed effectively by using the appropriate KPIs.

In summary, this tutorial will enable you to:

• Understand data excellence and its importance
• Identify areas within the organization that are most in need of a data excellence focus
• Communicate the importance of data excellence more successfully with both the business side and IT
• Organize and run a data excellence project
• Developing data standards in the right places at the right time
• Assigning stewardship to the right people
• Selecting the right KPIs

DATA MODELLING ESSENTIALS - REVISITED

		Graeme Simsion Senior Fellow University of Melbourne
		Graham Witt Independent Consultant

Graeme and Graham are the authors of Data Modeling Essentials – first published 10 years ago. They have spent much of the last year on a substantial revision of the book for its third edition. Always outspoken on data modeling topics, Graeme and Graham will look at some of the most important issues in data modeling, from a practitioner perspective – and offer their forthright, controversial, but always stimulating views. For example:

• How do we justify data modeling in today’s IS environment?
• How do we respond to the UML push?
• How do we engage the business – and get informed input?
• Conceptual, logical and physical – what’s the difference and why?
• How do we resolve difference amongst modelers – and models?
• How do we exploit the features of SQL99 DBMSs?
• Is enterprise-wide data modeling worth the effort?
• What skills will data modelers need in the (near) future?

DATA WAREHOUSE – ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND SUSTAINING

John Ladley President KI Solutions

As data warehouse nestles into the information architecture tool kit, many companies and organizations are still grappling with fundamental development challenges and growth issues. In a focused and pragmatic style (and occasionally entertaining) this tutorial cuts through vendor fog and guru religious wars. Without any preaching, attendees will review the influencing trends and learn practical techniques to SUSTAIN their data warehouse.

Trends - Defining Data Warehouse in the 21st Century:

• What is the value proposition?
• Is there a difference from historical definitions?
• Alignment definition and relevance
• What is the current state of DW and BI technology?

Re-initiating a Data Warehouse Project:

• Creating a manageable project plan
• Understanding the effect of knowledge cultures on DW
• Assessing the readiness of an organization to use/sustain the DW

Defining the Data Warehouse Requirements:

• Avoiding dumb things that don’t work, no matter what it says in the book
• Techniques for alignment
• Linking the DW to business processes
• Considering Data Quality
• Engaging the business user to sustain buy in
• How to define the technology requirements

Sustaining the DW:

• Change Management and other Sustaining stuff
• How to make sure that the DW environment is efficient and cost effective

INTEGRATING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE INTO THE ENTERPRISE

Mike Ferguson Managing Director Intelligent Business Strategies

This session looks at how to integrate business intelligence into the core operational business processes to facilitate on-demand intelligent business. It presents a methodology for doing this and in addition looks at the options available and the pros and cons of each.

• What is intelligent business?
• Why do it? What are the business benefits?
• Approaches to integrating BI into the enterprise?
• Understanding business roles
• Integrating Business intelligence into enterprise portals
• Embedding business intelligence in operational applications
• BI in the database – what are the database vendors doing?
• BI web services – dynamic binding for intelligence on-demand
• Real-time processing – event driven data integration, automatic analysis and action taking?
• Business Activity Monitoring
• When to use what where

BEING RIGHT ISN'T ENOUGH: A CRASH COURSE IN CONSULTING SKILLS

Graeme Simsion Senior Fellow University of Melbourne

It's not the technical problems that beat us. It's the soft stuff: getting into the client's head, selling our solutions, getting stakeholders to play ball, writing reports, giving presentations... In the broadest sense, these are consulting skills, and most of us don't spend enough time on them.

In this session, Graeme Simsion, best known for his keynotes and workshops on data modeling and data management, will draw on another aspect of his experience: 20 years building and managing a successful consultancy. In addition to his own consulting work, Graeme managed some 70 professional staff, and delivered industry courses on consulting skills. In this session, he will cover some of the most important techniques for getting your ideas implemented, and your value recognised.

DATA MODELLING FOR BUSINESS RULES

Graham Witt Independent Consultant

This workshop takes participants through a proven practical approach to modelling data for business rules. While some theory is covered, the workshop focuses on ensuring that the rules required by the business are documented and effectively implemented (and rules they don’t really need are set aside). We will cover the following topics:

• Types of Business Rules
• Discovery and verification of Business Rules
• Representation and documentation of Business Rules
• Business Rules in the data model
• Business rule implementation:
• Data structures and properties
• Declared constraints
• Data content
• Rules engines
• Warnings vs prohibition
• Data-driven rule management
• Interesting rules:
• Temporal rules
• Rules constraining recursive relationships

A REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS WORKSHOP

David Hay President Essential Strategies

Object models, state/transition diagrams, use cases, entity/relationship diagrams, data flow diagrams? And so forth? There are too many different techniques out there! How am I to sort them all out? How do I know when to use which one?

John Zachman’s architecture framework provides the answer to this. Its thirty-six cells provide a home for every one of the system-development techniques that has been created over the last thirty years.

This workshop presents requirements analysis as the translation of a set of business owners’ views into an architecture and it will describe all the various techniques that can contribute to this. More importantly, the presentation will show how the techniques are related to each other.
This presentation is based on David Hay’s book, Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture.