Joyce Norris-Montanari, CBIP-CDMP, is president of DBTech Solutions, Inc. Joyce advises clients on all aspects of architectural integration, business intelligence and data management. Joyce advises clients about technology, including tools like ETL, profiling, database, quality and metadata. Joyce speaks frequently at data warehouse conferences and is a contributor to several trade publications. She co-authored Data Warehousing and E-Business (Wiley & Sons) with William H. Inmon and others. Joyce has managed and implemented data integrations, data warehouses and operational data stores in industries like education, pharmaceutical, restaurants, telecommunications, government, health care, financial, oil and gas, insurance, research and development and retail. She can be reached at jmontanari@earthlink.net.
I have a question --- do we need a logical data model for a conversion? Here are my thoughts. I believe the answer is yes if the conversion has any of the following characteristics: The target application is created in-house. This application will more than likely be enhanced in the
To perform a successful data conversion, you have to know a number of things. In this series, we have uncovered the following about our conversion: Scope of the conversion Infrastructure for the conversion Source of the conversion Target for the conversion Management for the conversion Testing and Quality Assurance for
There are multiple types of data models, and some companies choose to NOT data model purchased software applications. I view this a bit differently. I think that any purchased application is part of our enterprise, thus it is part of our enterprise data model (or that concept is part of the
Don't be shy! Interviewing people BEFORE or AFTER a facilitated session just takes a bit of confidence, and good preparation. Building your confidence gets easier and easier the more you participate in interviews. The objective is to prepare and not waste anyone’s valuable time. I like to prepare notes based on
So, the facilitated session is over. You have gathered a tremendous amount of information, and you may be wondering what to do now. I like to categorize all the information, and hopefully during the session you did some prioritization of the requirements based on company goals. If you have never
Facilitated sessions are an excellent way of gaining additional insight into the requirements and expectations for any conversion project. What I have found is that most of the participants in a facilitated session have different agendas and different priorities for the project, so the facilitator must be neutral. Usually 5-8
To complete any conversion, with success, always seems to require a good understanding of the existing environment and platform. In fact, I would not move forward without the background analysis work products. You may want to consider some analysis of what is already in place, and understand: What is the
How many projects have you worked on that forgot to test size, volume, and conduct load balancing in a newly converted environment? I have worked on a few of those types of projects. I know in a data warehousing effort, we always check any servers and databases, based on load,
What kind of security do we need for this conversion? In fact, where are the security people? Including security personnel upfront in any conversion project can sure save some time and heartache later. It is important to include security for the following: Source system access – You must be able
Testing, testing, testing...do we really need testing? The answer is YES! Always! The big questions are: 1. How do I test? 2. What do I test? 3. Do we just do program testing or do we include testing data quality? 4. What about volume testing? 5. Who signs off on after-test completion?
