POST-CONFERENCE TUTORIALS • 6 November 2008

How to Evaluate, Select, and Implement your Metadata Management Solution
Stu Carty, Gavilan Research Associates

Are you planning to evaluate, purchase, or build a metadata management solution in 2008 or 2009? Are you looking for ideas or suggestions to help you implement & use a metadata solution that was previously purchased?

This tutorial will help you to get organized for this important project! The tutorial will explore key issues, needs, requirements, usage trends, and evaluation criteria that Global 5000 companies are using today to effectively evaluate and justify metadata software solutions. The tutorial will discuss real survey results on the latest metadata vendor tools – software products, capabilities, comparisons, best-fit, features, strengths, and weaknesses. The tutorial will help you to better manage the vendor selection process by providing a set of tools and checklists for more effectively communicating your needs to the vendor. The tutorial will discuss best practices & approaches for successfully implementing metadata software products.

• Your Metadata Management Requirements - what are they? What issues are Global 5000 companies currently struggling with concerning metadata management? How do these issues compare to your requirements?
• Evaluation Criteria - what criteria should be used to effectively evaluate a metadata management solution in 2008?
• The Vendor Selection Process - what tools can be used to better communicate with the metadata vendor community to choose the best possible solution for your company?
• Implementation Support - what are some of the key implementation tactics you can directly employ to gain immediate use, acceptance, and ROI for your metadata management solution ? How can you increase your chance of success?
• Vendor Product Reviews.
• Supporting Materials - each participant in the tutorial will receive individual printed hardcopies of the latest metadata usage research (worth £45) and metadata vendor comparison reports (worth £495) from GRA.

Quality by Design: Event Management for Effective Data Movement
Andres Perez, IRM Consulting

Organizations spend large amounts of money, time and human resources implementing data movement processes only to find their internal and external information customers disappointed with the quality of the information. Defect detection and correction in data movement processes is a trial-and-error, time consuming, and error prone process. Some processes are so difficult to maintain that organizations use “after the fact” data correction, adding to the overall complexity of the environment.

This presentation:

• Describes practical methods and techniques to implement the Quality By Design Rule: “Capture Information About Defects & Events.” Capturing details on processes, events and information defects makes defect correction possible and efficient
• Describes methods for applying traditional data warehousing and operational design concepts to inform stewards of information defects encountered during the movement of information
• Provides guidance on how to move from principles to implementation.

Driving Positive Business Impacts through Data Quality
David Evans, British Telecom
Nigel Turner, British Telecom
Bridgette Griffiths, British Telecom

Spend a day with three of BT's gnarled, wizened and mightily experienced Data Quality consultants!

Find out why data quality issues lie at the heart of business problems. Discover how BT began its Data Quality journey, developed principles, methodologies and governance structures to drive savings. Then try it yourself as CIO of a fictional hotel group. It has business survival issues to solve. Be warned you get to do some work it’s not all ‘chalk and talk’! Helped by BT’s consultants, you identify the issues and link them to underlying data quality problems and deliver proposals for improvements! Enjoy – it’ll be great fun!

Here’s how the day looks:-

• History of DQ in BT -- business drivers, governance structures and case studies.
• DQ Principles and Methodology -- use of tools and development of measures.
• Case study - teams of 4-6 relate business problems to data quality issues, build business cases and proposals to present to the rest of the class.

Business Intelligence Roadmap: Agile Project Management and Spiral Methodology for DW and BI Projects
Larissa T. Moss, Method Focus, Inc.

As you are managing your DW or BI project, you draw upon your past experience as a project manager. But to your dismay, you find that in spite of your experience, your DW/BI project is unusually difficult to manage. The requirements appear to be a "moving target." Communication between staff members takes too long. Assigning tasks in a traditional way seems to result in too much rework. Using a traditional methodology does not work. To top it all off, the business users are pressuring you for quick deliverables (90 days or less) as they are still “fine-tuning” their requirements. As your project team scrambles to meet those expectations, data standardization is skipped, testing is cut short, documentation is not done, and quality is compromised. The end result is often an independent data mart – always accompanied by the promise to clean it up later and to consolidate it with the other silo data marts (and data warehouses), which regrettably rarely happens. Sound familiar? Is it possible to “have your cake and eat it too?" In other words, how can you build an integrated DW/BI environment with quality and still deliver something every 90 days? You have to set aside some of the traditional project management disciplines and try a new approach. In this course, you will learn a new agile project management approach for DW and BI projects as well as a soup-to-nuts spiral DW/BI methodology.

You Will Learn:

• How to recognize and mitigate common DW risks and identify critical success factors
• How to build your DW and BI applications iteratively using a software release concept
• How to use a spiral DW methodology to define, plan, and control your project
• How to organize and empower your project teams, including their roles and responsibilities
• How to coordinate and manage multiple inter-dependent projects under one BI Program
• How to overcome organizational and cultural barriers to implementing this new approach

Geared To:

• Project managers
• Project leads
• Business managers
• End users

PREREQUISITE: Basic understanding of project management and data warehousing

Transition from Logical Model to Physical Database
Tom Haughey, President, InfoModel LLC

Performing the conversion of a Logical Data Model to a Physical Database design has often troubled the data modeler and mystified the DBA. However, with the use of a few simple principles and several clearly defined stages, this conversion can be made manageable and understandable. The first step is the definition of key empirical data, which are called design factors. Guided by these factors, the designer can then make sensible and systematic trade-offs to the data. The key is to balance these trade-offs. Technology trade-offs, such as adding indices, do not modify the data structure but can help optimize the system. Safe trade-offs make compromises without jeopardizing integrity. For example, splitting a large table into several non-redundant tables, or collapsing trivial code tables. Aggressive trade-offs do compromise integrity but can provide big performance gains. Examples of these are adding redundancy and storing derived data.

On workshop completion, participants will be able to:

• Perform the conversion of a Logical Data Model to a Physical Database design
• Understand types of trade-offs and their impact on design
• Define integrity requirements
• Perform access path analysis

Full Day
Tutorial
09:00-16:30

Presentation Skills for IT Specialists
Rick van der Lans, IT Specialist and Consultant, R20/Consultancy

IT specialists, whether they are data modelers, architects, project managers, or database administrators, they all have to present regularly. Presentations can range from private events, to a more public setting. To improve their presentation skills one could go to a classic course, however, those presenters don’t understand the specifics of IT. This tutorial is specifically designed for IT specialists, based on the experiences of IT specialists with all the examples also IT related.

• The importance of having one key message
• Start your presentations with a bang
• How to order the topics of a technical session
• How to prepare yourself for a presentation
• Dare to simplify IT specifics
• Guidelines for developing readable slides