Category Archives: Operational Efficiency
Lean Manufacturing in the Data Warehouse Factory – Building Trusted Data
Lean manufacturing, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful…Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work” and is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS). I’ve been having discussions with Jim Harris from OCDQ Blog and Reuben Vandeventer, Director of Data Governance for CNO Financial and others about best practices for data quality management and the applicability of lean management practices as it relates to data warehousing. Click here to hear Jim, Reuben and I discuss three critical areas of data quality to focus on for building data warehouses that people actually use and trust.
When It Comes to Data Quality Delivery, the Soft Stuff Is the Hard Stuff (Part 4 of 6)
In my previous post I emphasized the importance of demonstrated project management fundamentals as a key enabler of effective data quality delivery. In this blog, I will discuss why an understanding of corporate financial concepts is so important to data quality success.
Despite the continued evolution of data management technologies and the growing awareness of the challenges and promises of data quality, business buy-in is still a major barrier to the widespread adoption of data quality as another lever to achieve operational effectiveness. One of the key reasons for limited adoption is a clear linkage between data quality and a business’s performance, which is measured in a myriad of ways from operational metrics to managerial reports to formal KPIs. But, eventually, the enterprise’s performance is summarized in three key financial statements; the income statement, the balance sheet and the cash flow statement. Positioning data quality impacts or improvements in the context of these financial statements begins to “connect the dots” and moves data quality from the abstract to the concrete and from the theoretical to the practical. To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at the impacts and implications of a simple data quality issue like “undeliverable” billing addresses. (more…)
The Value of Knowing the Value
Ever wondered if an initiative is worth the effort? Ever wondered how to quantify its worth? This is a loaded question as you may suspect but I wanted to ask it nevertheless as my team of Global Industry Consultants work with clients around the world to do just that (aka Business Value Assessment or BVA) for solutions anchored around Informatica’s products.
How far will your investment stretch?
As these solutions typically involve multiple core business processes stretching over multiple departments and leveraging a legion of technology components like ETL, metadata management, business glossary, BPM, data virtualization, legacy ERP, CRM and billing systems, it initially sounds like a daunting level of complexity. Opening this can of worms may end up in a measurement fatigue (I think I just discovered a new medical malaise.) (more…)
Informatica Ultra Messaging: Great Performance . . . At Lower Cost?
Printed words are good, but pictures and sound are better. Watch the video below for a quick summation of how Informatica Ultra Messaging can help your business:
- Increase application performance and throughput
- Reduce fixed and operational costs
- Increase capacity
- Reduce single points of failure
- Increase scalability, reliability, and availability
For more information, have a look at: Ultra Messaging, Better Value with Better Technology.
More Trading Firms Using a “Trade Smarter, Not Harder” Strategy
There are lots of ways to run a trading firm.
Some firms use a strategy centered around high frequency or algorithmic trading, which are similar in that having the best technology and writing the fastest trading applications is essential.
At the other end of the spectrum, some firms employ only human traders, using a traditional buy-and-hold strategy, expecting to hold the security for months or even years before moving it.
But in between these two ends of the spectrum, there exists a hybrid that uses electronic trading with a bit of buy-and-hold added in. Some call this blend “trade smarter, not harder”.
Instead of competing with other traders to get the absolute lowest price, this strategy prioritizes on making better decisions by doing “pre-trade analytics” on historical and financial data.
Electronic Trading Systems Moving to the Cloud
More and more business applications are moving from the desktop to the cloud, and electronic trading applications are no different.
Over the last five or ten years, application vendors have established several advantages of running major applications, even mission-critical applications like salesforce.com, over the cloud.
These advantages include:
- Easier and smoother upgrades, which provides much better adaptability and agility in the face of changing market and business conditions, plus a better user experience,
- Better scalability, with newer technology advances, and
- Better portability across a wide array of device types, including smartphones and tablets (especially in the last 2-3 years).
Recent improvements in Web technology, such as HTML5 WebSockets, are helping to speed this transition along by providing several throughput and latency advantages over earlier iterations of Web technology, and even over native Windows applications. Now, application architects can freely choose the technology that provides a better path for growth, agility, and scalability, which is often a Cloud-based solution.
As I write this, a few of our customers who provide electronic trading solutions to their clients are making the strategic move to develop a next generation application based in the Cloud. The main driver for one customer was to be able to take on more clients more quickly and therefore grow the business faster by increasing marginal revenue and profitability. They found that the list of challenges with a thick desktop client to be just too big for growing the business as quickly as they wanted to — or needed to.
Messaging middleware, especially peer-to-peer solutions such as Informatica Ultra Messaging, can be a very important piece of a Cloud-based application. The peer-to-peer “nothing in the middle” model provides applications not just ultra-high performance (whether for high throughput or low latency), but also near-linear scalability, true 24×7 reliability and availability, and business and IT agility. These qualities tie directly to the advantages listed above.
Cloud-based applications, of course, must also contend with the Internet and all that comes with that: support for various browsers and platforms (and versions of each), scalability and bandwidth issues, and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. New web technologies like HTML5 WebSockets from Kaazing are best positioned to take care of the path from server to the smartphone or tablet, and with JMS connectivity to Ultra Messaging on the back end, can provide a Cloud-based application with a lean, scalable and agile infrastructure, usually with less hardware.
For more, please see our 2011 Efficiency series (#1, #2, #3) on our Perspectives blog, or whitepapers such as Modern Messaging Middleware for Big Data in Motion or Enterprise Messaging Data for the Web.
Data Quality Goes Green in Colorado, and on the Informatica Marketplace
A recent trip to a supermarket in Telluride, Colorado struck me as a funny place to find an analogy for data quality, but there it was. You see, supermarkets here require you to bring your own bags to cart your groceries home. Those brown disposable plastic bags are banned here – the town has made a firm commitment to the philosophy of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. By adhering to this environmental philosophy, data integration teams can develop and deploy successful data quality strategies across the enterprise despite the constraints of today’s “do more with less” IT budgets.
In the decade that I’ve been in the Information Management space, I’ve noticed that success in data integration usually comes in small increments – typically on a project by project basis. However, by leveraging those small incremental successes and deploying them in a repeatable, consistent fashion – either as standardized rules sets or data services in a SOA – development teams can maximize their impact at the enterprise level.
Big Data, Tipping Points and Disposable Data Integration
At our recent Informatica World Conference I had a revelation. These don’t come often to me, and it was made all the clearer to me when I was watching EMC World unfold across the social networks recently as well.
My revelation relates to the impact Big Data is going to have on enterprises and their approach to integrating data. I believe that Big Data will be the tipping point that will force enterprises to move away from hand-coding and other disposable data integration (or “DDI”) techniques. Just as we did 30 years ago when enterprises threw out hand coding and embraced the relational database; just as we did 15 years ago when enterprises threw out hand coding and embraced storage management software, now so too must enterprises throw out hand coding that delivers disposable data integration and embrace commercially available data integration software for true enterprise data integration. There is simply no other way of managing the enormous volumes, variety and velocity that will hit all enterprises in the coming years. (more…)
Electronic Trading Moves Into Fixed Income
Evaluating a price in the Equities or Foreign Exchange (“FX”) markets does not require much calculation, and so one of the prime limiting factors on winning those trades has been the speed of data movement, from one application to another, either within the same host or across the network. But the world of Fixed Income, commonly known as “bonds”, is different. (more…)
Increasing Sales and Marketing Efficiency with Master Data Management
Our customers tell us that their most important asset is their data. We are no different and, as a marketer, I am always looking at ways in which I can “do more with less” and drive greater efficiency. Master Data Management (MDM) is a critical component of our infrastructure which is having a significant positive effect on our internal efficiency. MDM is a solution that helps deliver a single view of a customer across different operational systems on-premise or in the cloud – including the relationships that the customer has with other people and the products they have purchased. However, we also use it for another reason – to improve our lead processing efficiency. (more…)
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