With Gratitude
I’ve been getting a number of “Happy Thanksgiving” e-mails today, and they’re very nice. But they’ve prompted me to think about all of the things I have that I need to grateful for, as this year starts to winds to a close.
First, my family. It’s hard having an entrepreneur as a husband and father. I have spent more time this year in hotel rooms and clients’ offices than at home, and for that I’m sorry. Hopefully the new year will see me spending more time in the Boston area than on the road, and being more present in all of your lives. And I’m hoping the sacrifices we’ve all made in building this business will continue to pay dividends in 2010 and beyond.
Second, our clients. They’ve been great this year. As usual, I won’t name names here. But you know who you are, and you know how grateful we are that you are working with us. We try to work hard for you and to always make your projects a success, but we recognize that you’re right there with us, working hard and investing yourselves in our success.
Third, our people and team members. It is a privilege to work with you. Every day, I learn something from you. Some of the best times in my professional career have been this year (some of the hardest too!). But I always learned something, and I thank you for taking the time to teach me. It is always interesting.
Lastly, to everyone who reads our web site, this blog, our newsletter, our magazine articles, who caught one of our speaking engagements this year, or who joined the MDM Community – thank you! The extended community that Hub Designs is part of is very special to me. People that I run into at conferences, or that send me e-mails offering to connect me with people they know, or that reach out to me through LinkedIn, or that read my postings on Twitter, are all very important to me.
A few years ago, before I really knew the value of social networking, I didn’t understand it and thought it was a little frivolous. Now, I understand its power – to connect us to one another, to effect change, to weave people and companies together in a new way, to make the 21st century more intimate, to allow me to sit in my office and say thank you to thousands of people at once, without blasting a newsletter into people’s inboxes, without sending out a mailing, without placing an ad, without doing any of the traditional things companies would have done at one time to get their message across (and are still doing).
Today, to me, it’s all about authenticity, and helping people, and being in the right place at the right time. And for that, I’m grateful.
Calendar and MDM
The Hub Designs Blog welcomes a guest post by Rob DuMoulin, an information architect with more than 26 years of IT experience, specializing in master data management, database administration and design, and business intelligence.
Most business intelligence architects are well versed in the value of the time dimension.
With query performance and the need to support complex analyses being the two most important considerations in BI, a flattened set of time dimensions provides a multitude of options to represent and standardize time with limited overhead.
It’s easy to see the value of having a flexible, consistent, and integrated representation of time when thinking of business activities. Aspects such as when a transaction or activity occurs in relationship to other transactions, activities, or even pre-defined thresholds form the basis of Business Process Management activities. And accounting departments group transactions into time periods every financial reporting period.
So, how valuable can this same time dimensions be to a Master Data Management solution? If you are well versed in MDM at this point, you’re probably saying “What you’ve talked about so far is useful for relating transactions but it doesn’t tie back to mastering business objects like customers, products, or locations”.
But remember that mastering those objects does require standardization during information acquisition and publishing and that the various inputs and outputs to an MDM system are often diverse. Also, don’t underestimate the value of mastering “Time Tables” themselves as a component in your MDM universe.
First, let’s define just what we mean by a set of time tables before we apply them to MDM. A typical implementation would have two distinct groups of tables to represent time: day, and time-of-day. At the lowest level of the day group is a day-level table with every imaginable way the business can identify a day, such as: by its day of year, week, month, quarter, advertising week (for retail), same day last year (in some special context), or special tags like holiday, weekend, season, positional sunrise/sunset times, or even astrological sign and full moon cycles. And that just covers the calendar view of the business. There is an equally important and extensive set of calendar hierarchies and attributes associated with the business fiscal reporting needs. Add to that every way you want to represent attributes like day of the week or month of the year (number, 3-letter abbreviation, full name) and ending up with over 100 attributes in the day-level table is not uncommon.
Related to the day-level table are hierarchy tables at levels such as: month, quarter, year (and their fiscal counterparts). Each of the hierarchy tables contains all the attributes that define that level and higher levels. For example, the calendar month table would contain attributes defining month of year, month of quarter, and month overall, in addition to quarter and year and all the ways to call the month. Primary keys for the higher level hierarchy tables, like month, would have child entries in the lower level tables, like day, for every entry that rolls into the higher level.
The same holds true for time of day, with hierarchies like hour, minute of hour, shift, peak time, off-peak time, and others.
Because all the higher-level attributes are repeated in the lower-levels, there is typically not a compelling need to join the two tables. The relationships are there for flexibility. Having the various hierarchy tables as stand-alone entities allows you to attach them to business tables at all of the levels you collect or report time values. These tables and hierarchy relationships allow you to easily merge data of different time grains.
The best thing about time is that time is constant. There are always sixty seconds to the minute, sixty minutes to the hour, twenty-four hours to the day (excluding Daylight Savings Time adjustments), seven days to the week, the number of days to the month is fixed, the number of days in a year is predictable. Except for adjustments to fiscal calendars and special events, most of the information related to time hierarchies is static.
BI uses these techniques to conform information allowing it to readily apply to many views of the business… which sounds a lot like the same business issues we try to solve when integrating data within an MDM solution.
Introducing a robust set of Master Time dimensions into an MDM architecture opens up flexibility in how you consolidate information and also how you can apply it to many business purposes. It’s a natural expansion of MDM to include a master version of the corporate calendar (particularly the fiscal calendar) using a common set of time-related identifiers complete with any time references relevant to business operations.
Please let us know what you think of mastering the Time dimension or other types of corporate reference data in the MDM hub by leaving a comment here.
First Look at Oracle Fusion MDM Hub
“All NDAs are lifted” were the magic words uttered by Steve Miranda from Oracle at the Fusion Inner Circle Event at Oracle OpenWorld on October 15th.
Just to make sure, I asked Steve explicitly during the Q&A section of the program if it was okay under the non-disclosure agreement we had all signed to write about Fusion on my blog, and he said “Yes.”
Hub Designs was invited back in February to help Oracle’s Fusion MDM team with some design review, validation, and testing activities. In return for our assistance, we’ve gotten to see Fusion MDM inside and out, and we can proudly say that we are one of the very few trusted partners who helped Oracle to design and develop the application.
We participated in a lot of conference calls with Haidong Song, Oracle’s Product Strategy Director for Customer MDM, and other members of his team. And we attended a week-long “hands-on validation” event at Oracle headquarters in August, looking specifically at the customer data management aspects of the Fusion MDM hub.
My first impressions of Fusion MDM during that hands-on session were very favorable. I remember thinking to myself, “Oracle could almost start selling this into the MDM hub market right now!”
Of course, Fusion isn’t scheduled to ship until sometime in 2010, and there’s still plenty of work to be done between now and then. But the core functionality needed for master data management was there, and the Oracle Fusion MDM team had a room full of customers and partners banging on it for a week without any significant crashes or issues.
There was plenty to like in Fusion that didn’t relate specifically to master data management – the new and improved user interface, the embedded analytics, the modern, standards-based architecture, the usability research that Oracle has done, the improved business processes, the built-in collaboration capabilities …
But the fundamentals of MDM were strong as well. Haidong and his team demonstrated how to import and consolidate customer data from outside sources, and we did our first hands-on lab session bringing in a small customer data load from a desktop file, such as a list of trade show leads.
We also tested a larger volume of customer data being brought into Fusion MDM through the Bulk Import process.
We did another exercise simulating how a typical customer data steward would identify potential duplicate customers, and then resolve those duplicates by merging the duplicate parties.
We also got a good look at the Informatica components that Oracle is bundling into Fusion on an OEM basis: the former Identity Systems matching engine and the former Address Doctor address cleansing tool. Previous Oracle MDM products like Customer Data Hub have had loose integration with Trillium and Firstlogic for address cleansing, but it’s refreshing to see Oracle investing in deep integration with industry leading solutions.
I think there are going to be a lot of Oracle customers who will move to Fusion MDM as the first wave of their overall migration to Fusion, who will see Fusion MDM as a good way to get some early experience with the Fusion applications family, before committing their mission critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to the Fusion platform.
And in 2010 and beyond, I think will be a lot of potential customers who evaluate Fusion MDM positively on its own merits against competitive MDM hubs. Oracle brings a robust data model, open architecture, and a next-generation approach to master data management, with state-of-the-art matching, data quality, middleware, and business process management.
Please let me know by commenting here what your thoughts and expectations are for Oracle’s Fusion MDM hub.
Oracle OpenWorld Presentation
I had a great time at the Oracle OpenWorld conference this year.
Oracle did a great job organizing the MDM track. There were a lot of great presentations, and a good balance of speakers between Oracle people, outside consultants and experts, and end users with success stories to share.
David Butler, Senior Director of MDM Marketing at Oracle, was kind enough to convert my presentation titled “Best Practices in Master Data Management and Data Governance” to PDF format and to post it on the Oracle.com MDM web page.
You can find it in the ‘Partners’ portlet on the right hand side of the page, or just click here.
D&D Computers One, Best Buy Zero
I had a laptop “near death experience” over the past few days. It actually started on Saturday (which was Halloween). So I guess that makes this a “Halloween Hard Drive Horror Show”.
First, my Sony Vaio, which I’ve had for two years, got a little wobbly. Windows Vista wanted to run the dreaded CHKDSK utility. Things went down hill from there very quickly.
Monday night, I went back to my hotel room after working at my client’s offices all day, and the laptop refused to boot up at all. I gave it my best “I am not a techie” try, and realized this was not something I was going to be able to resolve on my own. No problem, I thought. I bought this laptop at Best Buy and was smart enough (I thought) to purchase a three-year extended warranty at the time (for an additional $600).
So yesterday morning, I showed up when the local Best Buy opened their doors, with my service plan number in hand. After a brief wait, I spoke with a member of the Geek Squad. He regretted to inform me that neither hard drive failure or reinstalling Windows Vista were covered by my extended warranty. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their Yellow Pages.
I got really lucky finding D&D Computers in Huber Heights, Ohio.
Brian Dean, the Chief Tech, told me to come right over. I got there a little after 11:00 am, and was there until just after 4:00 pm. Brian took extremely good care of me and my laptop. At my request, he replaced my failing 150 GB hard drive with a brand new 500 GB drive, bumped my RAM up from 2 GB to 4 GB, and installed Windows 7 on the new drive.
I had to reinstall all of my applications, which took a few hours last night. But to be back up and running in less than 24 hours, and to have gotten a major laptop upgrade out of all this, was a great outcome. I even got my old hard drive installed in a little enclosure so I could hook it up to my laptop using a USB cable, to access all of my data.
The total cost was $885 ($321 at Staples for the full version of Windows 7 Professional, $500 at D&D Computers for the new hard drive, new RAM and their labor, and $64 at Best Buy for the USB drive enclosure).
The moral of the story: read the fine print of your extended warranty, let your fingers do the walking and make sure you’re current on backing up your hard drive!
