TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009

Founded in 1995, TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute™) is the premier educational institute for business intelligence and data warehousing that provides education, training, certification, news, and research for executives and information technology professionals worldwide. TDWI conferences always offer a variety of full-day and half-day courses taught in an objective, vendor-neutral manner. The courses taught are designed for professionals and taught by in-the-trenches practitioners who are well known in the industry.

TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009 was held May 3-8 in Chicago, Illinois at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and was a tremendous success. I attended as a Data Quality Journalist for the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ).

I used Twitter to provide live reporting from the conference. Here are my notes from the courses I attended…

Founded in 1995, TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute™) is the premier educational institute for business intelligence and data warehousing that provides education, training, certification, news, and research for executives and information technology professionals worldwide. TDWI conferences always offer a variety of full-day and half-day courses taught in an objective, vendor-neutral manner. The courses taught are designed for professionals and taught by in-the-trenches practitioners who are well known in the industry.

TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009 was held May 3-8 in Chicago, Illinois at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and was a tremendous success. I attended as a Data Quality Journalist for the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ).

I used Twitter to provide live reporting from the conference. Here are my notes from the courses I attended: 

BI from Both Sides: Aligning Business and IT

Jill Dyché, CBIP, is a partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting, a management and technology consulting firm that provides data integration and business analytics services. Jill is responsible for delivering industry and client advisory services, is a frequent lecturer and writer on the business value of IT, and writes the excellent Inside the Biz blog. She is the author of acclaimed books on the business value of information: e-Data: Turning Data Into Information With Data Warehousing and The CRM Handbook: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management. Her latest book, written with Evan Levy, is Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth.

Course Quotes from Jill Dyché:

• Five Critical Success Factors for Business Intelligence (BI):

1. Organization – Build organizational structures and skills to foster a sustainable program
2. Processes – Align both business and IT development processes that facilitate delivery of ongoing business value
3. Technology – Select and build technologies that deploy information cost-effectively
4. Strategy – Align information solutions to the company’s strategic goals and objectives
5. Information – Treat data as an asset by separating data management from technology implementation

1. What is the business need, pain, or problem?  What business questions do we need to answer?
2. What data is necessary to answer those business questions?
3. How do we need to use the resulting information to answer those business questions?

TDWI Data Governance Summit

Philip Russom is the Senior Manager of Research and Services at TDWI, where he oversees many of TDWI’s research-oriented publications, services, and events. Prior to joining TDWI in 2005, he was an industry analyst covering BI at Forrester Research, as well as a contributing editor with Intelligent Enterprise and Information Management (formerly DM Review) magazines.

Summit Quotes from Philip Russom:

• “Data Governance usually boils down to some form of control for data and its usage”
• “Four Ps of Data Governance: People, Policies, Procedures, Process”
• “Three Pillars of Data Governance: Compliance, Business Transformation, Business Integration”
• “Two Foundations of Data Governance: Business Initiatives and Data Management Practices”
• “Cross-functional collaboration is a requirement for successful Data Governance”

Becky Briggs, CBIP, CMQ/OE, is a Senior Manager and Data Steward for Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) and has 25 years of experience in data processing and IT – the last 9 in data warehousing and BI. She leads the program team responsible for product, project, and quality management, business line performance management, and data governance/stewardship.

Summit Quotes from Becky Briggs:

• “Data Governance is the act of managing the organization’s data assets in a way that promotes business value, integrity, usability, security and consistency across the company”
• Five Steps of Data Governance:

1. Determine what data is required
2. Evaluate potential data sources (internal and external)
3. Perform data profiling and analysis on data sources
4. Data Services – Definition, modeling, mapping, quality, integration, monitoring
5. Data Stewardship – Classification, access requirements, archiving guidelines

Barbara Shelby is a Senior Software Engineer for IBM with over 25 years of experience holding positions of technical specialist, consultant, and line management. Her global management and leadership positions encompassed network authentication, authorization application development, corporate business systems data architecture, and database development.

Summit Quotes from Barbara Shelby:

• Four Common Barriers to Data Governance:

1. Information – Existence of information silos and inconsistent data meanings
2. Organization – Lack of end-to-end data ownership and organization cultural challenges
3. Skill – Difficulty shifting resources from operational to transformational initiatives
4. Technology – Business data locked in large applications and slow deployment of new technology

1. Enterprise Integration Team – Oversees the execution of CIO funded cross enterprise initiatives
2. Integrated Enterprise Assessment – Responsible for the success of transformational initiatives
3. Integrated Portfolio Management Team – Responsible for making ongoing business investment decisions
4. Unit Architecture Review – Responsible for the IT architecture compliance of business unit solutions

Lee Doss is a Senior IT Architect for IBM with over 25 years of information technology experience. He has a patent for process of aligning strategic capability for business transformation and he has held various positions including strategy, design, development, and customer support for IBM networking software products.

Summit Quotes from Lee Doss:

• Five Data Governance Best Practices:

1. Create a sense of urgency that the organization can rally around
2. Start small, grow fast…pick a few visible areas to set an example
3. Sunset legacy systems (application, data, tools) as new ones are deployed
4. Recognize the importance of organization culture…this will make or break you
5. Always, always, always – Listen to your customers

Kevin Kramer is a Senior Vice President and Director of Enterprise Sales for UMB Bank and is responsible for development of sales strategy, sales tool development, and implementation of enterprise-wide sales initiatives.

Summit Quotes from Kevin Kramer:

• “Without Data Governance, multiple sources of customer information can produce multiple versions of the truth”
• “Data Governance helps break down organizational silos and shares customer data as an enterprise asset”
• “Data Governance provides a roadmap that translates into best practices throughout the entire enterprise”

Kanon Cozad is a Senior Vice President and Director of Application Development for UMB Bank and is responsible for overall technical architecture strategy and oversees information integration activities.

Summit Quotes from Kanon Cozad:

• “Data Governance identifies business process priorities and then translates them into enabling technology”
• “Data Governance provides direction and Data Stewardship puts direction into action”
• “Data Stewardship identifies and prioritizes applications and data for consolidation and improvement”

Jill Dyché, CBIP, is a partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting, a management and technology consulting firm that provides data integration and business analytics services.  (For Jill’s complete bio, please see above).

Summit Quotes from Jill Dyché:

• “The hard part of Data Governance is the data”
• “No data will be formally sanctioned unless it meets a business need”
• “Data Governance focuses on policies and strategic alignment”
• “Data Management focuses on translating defined polices into executable actions”
• “Entrench Data Governance in the development environment”
• “Everything is customer data – even product and financial data”

Data Quality Assessment – Practical Skills

Arkady Maydanchik is a co-founder of Data Quality Group, a recognized practitioner, author, and educator in the field of data quality and information integration. Arkady’s data quality methodology and breakthrough ARKISTRA technology were used to provide services to numerous organizations. Arkady is the author of the excellent book Data Quality Assessment, a frequent speaker at various conferences and seminars, and a contributor to many journals and online publications. Data quality curriculum by Arkady Maydanchik can be found at eLearningCurve.

Course Quotes from Arkady Maydanchik:

• “Nothing is worse for data quality than desperately trying to fix it during the last few weeks of an ETL project”
• “Quality of data after conversion is in direct correlation with the amount of knowledge about actual data”
• “Data profiling tools do not do data profiling – it is done by data analysts using data profiling tools”
• “Data Profiling does not answer any questions – it helps us ask meaningful questions”
• “Data quality is measured by its fitness to the purpose of use – it’s essential to understand how data is used”
• “When data has multiple uses, there must be data quality rules for each specific use”
• “Effective root cause analysis requires not stopping after the answer to your first question – Keep asking: Why?”
• “The central product of a Data Quality Assessment is the Data Quality Scorecard”
• “Data quality scores must be both meaningful to a specific data use and be actionable”
• “Data quality scores must estimate both the cost of bad data and the ROI of data quality initiatives”

Modern Data Quality Techniques in Action – A Demonstration Using Human Resources Data

Gian Di Loreto formed Loreto Services and Technologies in 2004 from the client services division of Arkidata Corporation. Loreto Services provides data cleansing and integration consulting services to Fortune 500 companies.  Gian is a classically trained scientist – he received his PhD in elementary particle physics from Michigan State University.

Course Quotes from Gian Di Loreto:

• “Data Quality is rich with theory and concepts – however it is not an academic exercise, it has real business impact”
• “To do data quality well, you must walk away from the computer and go talk with the people using the data”
• “Undertaking a data quality initiative demands developing a deeper knowledge of the data and the business”
• “Some essential data quality rules are ‘hidden’ and can only be discovered by ‘clicking around’ in the data”
• “Data quality projects are not about systems working together – they are about people working together”
• “Sometimes, data quality can be ‘good enough’ for source systems but not when integrated with other systems”
• “Unfortunately, no one seems to care about bad data until they have it”
• “Data quality projects are only successful when you understand the problem before trying to solve it”

Mark Your Calendar

TDWI World Conference San Diego 2009 – August 2-7, 2009.

TDWI World Conference Orlando 2009 – November 1-6, 2009.

TDWI World Conference Las Vegas 2010 – February 21-26, 2010.

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