Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
A Glimpse into Giant, Co.
As the company has grown over the last fifty years, a lot of structure and
procedures have been put into place. There is already a strong, well-developed
set of enterprise reference data. It is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job
of keeping the core customer, product, employee, and supplier data clean.
All of the major application systems that have been written in house use these
master data sources. This provides great paths for integrating data across
sources, but several smaller applications were developed quickly, with no
interface to the shared reference data.
The organization excels at following standards. This is beneficial, but unfor-
tunately the organization has lost the ability to think creatively. Staff members
simply follow the rules, whether they make sense or not. It is easier to stay
in line than to step up and question the rules. These standards typically have
been refined with an operational system perspective. Flexibility and the need
for business-driven data for the data warehouse does not always fit as nicely.
Many project resources are wasted trying to challenge the status quo. Some-
times this does work eventually, but in other cases, the existing rules prevail.
This can affect the value that can be delivered to the business community.
There needs to be some level of flexibility and a mechanism to evaluate the
applicability of standards. This could help many projects, not just the data
warehouse.
Using the principles outlined in this chapter, an information management
strategy must be developed. The organization will be able to utilize much of
what has been developed to date. The addition of a data governance committee
and procedures will help the data warehouse team by providing a vehicle to
raise issues and the needed support to come to resolution.
Insight from Agile, Inc.
The organization prides itself on its entrepreneurial spirit. Do what you need to
get the job done. This provides a high level of energy and creativity. However,
this also has resulted in the organization having many different silos of business
processes and application systems. In addition, many of the application
systems are third-party packages that helped to get things running quickly.
This lack of coordinated effort and the resulting disparate systems has
resulted in extreme challenges for data integration. This has also had a
negative impact on data quality. Each project must fend for itself.
Starting down a more organized information management path is foreign to
both the business and IT staff. This will only be successful if specific business
problems can be addressed by the strategy. If no business problem is identified
and no specific business value is delivered, then any information management
efforts will fail. However, the organization has encountered many growing
