Tag Archives: Lean
There Is A Silver Bullet – Really!
Last month in The Biggest Dirty Little Secret in IT I highlighted a disturbing phenomenon – that in highly data-driven organizations that have large IT departments, as they get larger they become less efficient. In short, diseconomies of scale begin to creep in which slow down processes and drive up costs. The article went on to identify the root cause as a high degree of manual IT processes which don’t scale well. The question I will address in this article is what can we do to tackle the problem, and what is it worth? (more…)
The Biggest Application Is Not What You Think It Is
If you are asked “what is the biggest application in your organization”, what would you say? If you’re in banking you might say it’s the Hogan deposit system. If you’re in Telecom maybe it’s the Amdocs Customer Care and Billing system. If you’re in retail, you might say the Retek Merchandizing system. If you are a manufacturer, it might be your SAP ERP system. The list goes on, but you get the point. The prevailing perception is that the core business application of whatever industry you are in is the biggest application. But this is a case where perception is not reality. (more…)
Heathrow Airport Security is NOT Lean
This is a Lean Integration story – trust me, it will become clear as the story progresses.
I’ve now passed through London’s Heathrow airport security at least five times in the past year, so that makes me an expert. A common pattern I have observed is when the x-ray scanner notices something “suspicious” (like fluids or creams that should be in a separate clear plastic bag.) Then the nightmare starts. (more…)
A Big Hairy Audacious Vision
Integration technologies have been around for 20 years (as long as Informatica has been in business) and have proliferated in corporate IT. We are now at an inflection point in the business needs and maturity of integration best practices which we can call Next Generation Data Integration (DI). If we’re going to talk about the next generation, then first we need to put a stake in the ground to describe the current, or prior generation. Furthermore, for it to be a “generational” change, it needs to be a significant step-function improvement in how the work is done and in the business value generated by data assets. Or as Jim Collins said in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, we need a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. (more…)
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.
Top Seven Favorite Quotes From Lean Integration
The Kindle has a nice feature that is virtually impossible with paper books; it combines the highlighted sections of text (in essence an electronic yellow highlight marker) from all readers and identifies the passages with the greatest number. The View Popular Highlights function shows you passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. Here are the top seven highlighted quotes from Lean Integration[1] as of the end of 2012. (more…)
Seven (More) Tips To Become a Change Agent
In my last blog article, I talked about the challenges associated with changing an organization to establish a sustainable integration strategy, and I outlined the first two change management principles. Here are seven more of the original nine. (more…)
Is Your SAP BW Ready for HANA? Consider Nearline or Archiving to Reduce Your Production Data Size
The buzzword of the 2012 SAP TechEd was HANA. All sessions were fully booked with long lines in the corridors with IT managers, developers, DBAs and BASIS administrators anticipating the miracles of memory computing performance.
I attended sessions about archiving, near-line and preparedness to uptake HANA. On the other hand, those sessions were almost empty, some having less than 10 people in the room. It makes me wonder: do people realize that HANA may be the future, but to be able to deploy it economically and practically, you need to manage the data volume in your current production environment? (more…)
Process Re-Engineering Reborn
The cover of the September 10 issue of ComputerWorld caught my attention; the headline was Rebirth of Re-Engineering. I was intrigued how the analysts and pundits would spin Business Process Reengineering since I hadn’t seen the BPR acronym much since it fell out of favor around the turn of the century. As it turns out, the NEW BPR is all about Lean and Agile and is being led by IT. Wow! (more…)
How Do You Know If Your Data Has Integrity?
Data integrity is closely linked to the concept of trust which, in the world of human interactions, is based on a tight coupling between words and actions (do what you say and say what you do). In the IT world, this translates into first having a clear definition of data as well as how it is treated in the context of various business processes. If we have a clear definition of data, including policies such as access, privacy, change controls, etc. (the words), and if we have systems that consistently enforce the definition (the actions) then we have high trust and high data integrity. We know exactly what to expect, and the data always exactly matches our expectations. (more…)