Why the Hiatus?

I've had a few people ask now, why hasn't there been any updates?. My apologies, but I'm pretty busy with the PhD, trying to publish and teaching at the moment, it leaves little time for distraction.

I hope to get back to this again soon, but until then, keep an eye on the CRM Blog I'm helping with for IMS5028, a masters subject here at Monash.

Cheers,

Marcus.

Teradata Universe

A kind gesture to a poor academic (thanks Sean) means that yours truly is off to Sydney! I'll be attending Teradata Universe at the Sofitel Wentworth, in mid-March. That's right, I'll be discovering "how to throw the shackles off (my) organisational data and turn it into enterprise intelligence that creates new opportunities for business growth, increased efficiency and improved customer relationships." Phew, and all in just 2 days! I joke, but I am actually looking forward to it.

There are a number of sessions that interest me, such as "Data Governance: Applying Governance to a dysfunctional BI environment" but the one I'm really interested in is "The Value Proposition for a Data Warehouse Platform." This session is presented by Jim Blair, from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Those of you up with the research on data warehousing governance (as I plan to be by March!) will recall a paper lead-authored by Hugh Watson, appearing in a 2004 volume of Decision Support Systems. The paper presented the DW governance program at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, or "BCBSNC" for short (doesn't that just roll off the tounge?). BCBSNC won the Data Warehousing Institute's (TDWI) Best Practice Award in the data warehousing governance category, and it will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

I'll post a summary of the event after the fact. Cheers.

Active Data Warehousing and ROI

It's time to get this blog happening again.

This has been up a little while now, but it's worth pointing out - Take some time to listen to this Teradata podcast. It stars Rob Armstrong, Director of Data Warehousing Support at Teradata. I first read Rob's work in a rebuttal to the dimensional modeling manifesto in 1997, entitled 'Responding to Ralph'. The paper appeared as part of a white paper series from NCR.

The 'Ralph' to which Rob was responding was Ralph Kimball (PhD). For those of you that have been around long enough, Ralph helped design the first Star Workstation, at Xerox (384 Kilobytes of memory, and a whacking 40 Megabyte hard drive!). He also founded Red Brick Systems, now owned by IBM. Ralph's the author of two of the most widely-read data warehousing books around, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, and The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, and has written a bunch of articles for Intelligent Enterprise, essential reading for anyone studying a data warehousing course. Ralph LOVES dimensional modeling!

Sorry, I digress.

Now quite a few years on from his rebuttal to Ralph, Rob Armstrong is noted as 'a pragmatic visionary' and has written a book titled "Evolving Through Action: Maximizing Business Returns by Driving Action from the Data Warehouse." Rob knows his stuff. In this podcast, Rob aims to provide an understanding of the ROI potential of an 'active data warehouse'.

A key theme of the podcast is bringing data to process (pushing reports to users), and bringing process to data (bringing your questions to the DW), and he argues the benefits of the latter. He notes that integrating and simplifying data, is a step to creating value. Consolidation, a single view of the business, all drive value. No surprises there.

Whilst informative, I was hoping for a little more on the actual calculation of the ROI. How do you quantify ROI? Rob thinks that less than 10% of the people implementing DW's, actually quantify the benefits. This is scary, given the vast resources often required to implement these infrastructures. Rob suggests some reasons why these figures are not quantified. One being it's just too hard. For instance, how do you accurately determine the contribution of the DW to a better, money-saving, decision? A good point, and one I agree with wholeheartedly. Imagine, "No Boss, don't give me a raise, that excellent decision was really thanks to the data warehouse - maybe buy it some more RAM!" I think not.

Often the benefits of DW will show up in other areas of the organization's balance sheet, and once they're there, don't think for a minute, those reaping the rewards will thank the DW!

So, how do you measure ROI then, Rob? Rob suggests that you must plan to measure for it in the first place. The business case needs metrics to measure against later on. Agreed. In work I'm doing at the moment, I call this a 'baseline measure'. If you don't take a measure of current efficiency and effectiveness, then how can you determine what affect the DW has had on the organization once it's gone live?

Here's a timeline of the podcast:

00:29	Bringing process to data
03:27	Driving up the value of the data warehouse
05:20	Measuring ROI on data warehousing projects
08:09	Specific strategies to measure ROI
09:37	Necessary changes to drive value of data warehouse within an organization
13:32	Active Data Warehousing
14:21	Finding high-value opportunities in your organization
15:58	Questions companies should ask to get the most value from their data warehouse
18:44	Connecting to your customer

Overall, a podcast well worth listening to (if you can get past the somewhat benign, over-rehearsed, interviewer). Rob makes some good points, and as I said, knows his stuff.

More about Rob here, as interviewed by Dan Power (DSSResources.com)