Blog: David Loshin

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February 20, 2007

Everything in its Place

In almost all situations, every business activity happens somewhere. Yet is there any value in understanding how location factors into business influence? The answer is clearly "yes" - otherwise, why would millions (if not billions) of dollars be spent on analyzing geographics, demographics, etc. as a way of enhancing customer data? More to the point, I found an interesting web site the other day: www.freedemographics.com. It provides geographic information from the Census Bureau in report form. It does require registration, but may be interesting to check out.

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February 12, 2007

Data Governance vs. IT Governance

I recently attended a conference on data governance at which the keynote speaker suggested that data governance is completely separate from IT governance. As both a software engineer and a data management consultant, I was not sure that I could agree with that notion, and judging by some of the reaction in the audience, some others did not agree either. The application framework is tightly coupled with the information used by the applications; implementation decisions made by the application designers have significant impact on the underlying data infrastructure. And lastly, the ability to establish a fundamental enterprise architecture that enables auditability (which is of particular interest in the compliance space) requires close alignment between the IT and the information teams.

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February 1, 2007

Performance and Time - Part 1

Some interesting alignment of ideas is coming into play this week. First: One of our clients is buidling a set of data warehouses to collect and report on staff productivity across their widely distributed enterprise. The organization has many different locations, as well as ingrained operational processes that have been in place for 30-40 years. And basically, one of the major challenges is the ability to capture measurements associated with units of work. A very intersesting aspect of this is trying to understand ways to synchronize notions of "work" - is there a notion of a "unit of work," and how is that unit reflected in what people actually do.

The second issue has to do with my company's requirements. As consultants, we charge based on time, which necessitates a means for tracking the time spent on each activity. The challenge we have is a little different - each activity has its own set of policies associated with the task. For example, one task has different charge rates depending on whether we are working at the client site or working at our own site. Another example: in some cases the time period is daily, others hourly, while still others need to be tracked on the quarter hour. In each case, we need to keep track of activity metadata - activity name, class, onsite/offiste, billing rate, time increment, etc.

The direct operational driver for time tracking is invoicing - if you charge by the hour, you need to keep track of the hours worked so that you can assemble an invoice. But more interestingly, time tracking, when coupled with task management, gives the same kind of information that our client is interested in - productivity assessment.

So right now, our goal is to come up with a time tracking process that captures all the information we need (for invoicing) while enabling us to figure out what we want (for productivity). More on this saga to follow...

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