Blog: Dan E. Linstedt

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IT Agility and Repsonsiveness to the Business

It's not often in our industry you get a chance to read about successes. Too much press is given to negative types of issues. This entry is about successful implementations.

Would you like your IT team to build "Data marts in about an Hour?", How about full EDW's with AS-IS star schemas in 2 weeks (regardless of size of source systems, or number of systems to integrate)? Would you as a business user like to hear that your new requirements for reporting can be met within a 2 day turnaround? How about your IT team becoming a profit center for the stake-holder rather than a cost center?

Sound too good to be true? It's NOT! Honestly, this is the first time in a long time that I'm excited again to be in IT. I'm working with several customers in which we have made these things a reality. This entry is about how we did it, and how you can do it too.

The more I go, the more I realize that this is the key to success in any IT project. Of course hind-sight is 20-20 so therefore I should have realized this years and years ago, wait a minute.... I did. This is why I built the Data Vault Model, combined it with SEI/CMMI Level 5 approach (methodology for implementation) and now it's playing out.

What I've done over the years is combine, refine, and optimize everything from the project plan to the work breakdown structure, to the risk analysis and mitigation strategies. We've also applied SEI/CMMI Level 5, and combined it with PMP, Six Sigma, TQM, and Lean Initiatives to end up with drastically reduced cycle time, increased quality of the project, and massively leveraged team resources. We've reduced cost and improved delivery times of new projects 10x.

At specific customers that I've been visiting over the past 2 years, we've seen the Data Vault modeling and Methodology really take hold within customer sites. We have happier customers, long-term relationships, and the CORPORATIONS and IT Teams are winning together.

Let me explain: these are real case studies.
Customer A: Full as-is star schemas and EDW in 2 weeks
Took 198 tables, 4 source systems, combined the models (with some manual effort up-front - about two weeks worth of work before I came on-site), and within two days produced the following artifacts:
* Staging models
* Data Vault (EDW) Models
* AS-IS Star Schema Models
* Master Data Models
* Exploration Mart Models
* Oracle Stored procedures to Load Source to Stage
* Oracle Stored Procedures to Load Stage to Data Vault
* Oracle Stored Procedures to load Data Vault to AS-IS Star Schema.

At the end of two weeks, we had produced 3 cubes (that incorporate business rules) for the business users to access, see, feel and touch. We did this all with 3 people (myself, and 2 others) on the team, keeping cost down, delivery high, and quality high. The customer decided this was such a success that they wanted to make a change while I was on-site. They fed us a new source system to combine. We had the integration done and the new system in place within 5 days, again producing 1 new cube.

The business decided that they'd rather use our team for new deliveries instead of building their own analysis and integration projects. We had successfully stemmed (or at least reduced) the tide of spread-marts.

Company B: (Data marts in about an hour)
3 months in to production of the Data Vault EDW, for Manufacturing, we had delivered 5 reporting tables (report collections). The business users wanted to build new "star schemas". We created a two page requirements form with a sign-off. The business users usually took 1 week to "fill in the business requirements", but once they handed it to our team, it only took us about 1 hour to turn it around and have a star schema available (prototype filled with 5000 rows of sample data).

If they liked it, we would load the full compliment overnight. We did this over 15 years ago, and the Data Vault EDW is still in place today, and still running strong. We proved that "Data Marts in about an hour" was possible. Granted, the more complex the business rules, the longer it took to turn around a prototype. Our longest time to deliver in this situation was 1 week from receiving the requirements to prototype. The only other stipulation was that we already had the data, and it didn't require integrating a new system.

We had 3 people on this team; we supported 5000 production reports on a daily basis at the end of 3 months.

Company C: (Turning IT into a profit center), ANY good EDW should be able to do this!
At this particular company, we started the project 6 months in the hole. I was brought in to turn the project around. When I got there they had no requirements, no documentation, no tables, no loading systems, and almost no funding. The business users were fighting with IT over how it should even begin.

Well, long story short - inside of 3 weeks we had business requirements written. But, in addition to that the stake holder was concerned with the overall cost of the project, that he couldn't identify hard ROI, or even that justification for hardware would continue to be a "money pit" to grow the warehouse. We continued building the project this way for several months.

After 6 months we reached phase 1 production state and this is where our success begins. We were a cost-center for our stake holder at this time. We began receiving phone calls from other business units and other projects, could we build them a mart X, or a Mart Y, or could we provide them with reporting tables Z?

We said: yes, but here's our deal: we'll build the mart for you and we'll give you a 10 day or 30 day trial period. After which, if you don't like it, or you don't use it, we'll tear it down and take it away. If you like it/use it, we will begin charging you for disk space, and CPU load cycles to support the hardware necessary to grow your efforts.

We were able to make accurate projections of the hardware required for disk, and the CPU cycles required to load, along with the RAM used. We also monitored their query usage to see what data and how much data they accessed, and how often.

What ended up happening was the new business unit would "sign up" for a data mart service, and begin paying our stake-holder for the privilege of "renting" the machine resources. It got better from there, once they realized that this would work, they began asking for new systems to be incorporated. We would then begin a project costing and estimating phase where they became the "stake-holder" of that part of the system and data set.

We replicated the business model across the entire enterprise. We constantly had more projects than we could fill, the business users were happy, and actually able to cross-charge business units for use of their information. Viola, our main stake holder said we became a profit center for him.

Goes to show you, if you can run your IT team (no matter how big/small) like a business, you will get more business going forward...

I'd love to hear your success stories, if you'd care to share.

Cheers,
Daniel Linstedt

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