TUTORIAL DESCRIPTIONS
All 8 full-day tutorials take place simultaneously on Monday, March 5

T1: Zen and the Art of Data Modeling  
 Alec Sharp
Damex Consulting Group Ltd.

Somehow, really good data modelers can develop accurate and stable data models, and make it look easy. They’re unhurried and can adapt to “non-standard” situations, yet get the job done without wasting time while maintaining the full involvement of the subject matter experts. What separates them from the pack?

This intensive one-day workshop for intermediate and advanced data modelers provides hands-on experience with practical techniques used by successful data modelers. Themes that will be explored include:

Tutorial Outline

Alec Sharp: After a stint as a systems programmer and DBA, Alec caught the modeling bug after building his first data model in 1979. He founded the Damex Consulting Group Ltd. in 1981, and went on to assist many clients with establishing Data Administration functions, developing large database applications, and applying model-driven requirements techniques. Recent assignments have included selecting and configuring purchased Enterprise Applications, leading a process redesign effort, coaching project teams in business modeling techniques, and rescuing e-commerce projects that zeroed in on technology instead of looking at business process issues.

Alec is a past president of the British Columbia DAMA chapter, and has also served as a director of VISTA, Vancouver’s information systems training organization. He conducts workshops on Data Modeling, Workflow Process Modeling, Transaction and Business Rule Specification, and Facilitation & Presentation Skills at many large organizations. His book on Workflow Process Modeling (co-authored with Patrick McDermott) will be published by Artech House in December 2000. 

T2:  Applying Quality Principles to Data Definition and Data Modeling  
 Larry P. English  
President
INFORMATION IMPACT International, Inc.

Without quality data, businesses are at risk.  But poor data definition and information architecture quality undermines the organization’s ability to create, maintain—and exploit—quality information.  Data warehousing disasters call attention to the imperative of quality data definition in both the data warehouse as well as in operational databases.  In this tutorial, Mr. English describes how to apply the principles of data definition and information architecture quality discussed in his widely acclaimed book, Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality.

Data definition and data modeling are not documentation processes.  They are the processes of information product specification.  Mr. English describes guidelines for assessing data definition and information architecture (data model) quality.  He describes how you can apply Quality Function Deployment in the data definition process to assure that quality is designed in without compromising speed of development.  Quality function deployment is the set of tools and techniques for involving customers in the design of a product.

Tutorial Outline

Larry P. English president and principal of INFORMATION IMPACT International, Inc., is an internationally recognized speaker, teacher, consultant, and author in information and knowledge management and information quality improvement. He has provided consulting and education in more than 25 countries on five continents. He was featured as one of the “21 Voices for the 21st Century” in the January, 2000 issue of Quality Progress.  DAMA awarded him the 1998 “Individual Achievement Award” for his contributions to the field of information resource management.  He has chaired Information and Data Quality Conferences in the US and Europe since 1997.  He is also a founding partner of the Business Intelligence Alliance.

Mr. English’s methodology for information quality improvement—Total Quality data Management (TQdM®)—has been implemented in several organizations worldwide.  He writes the “Plain English on Data Quality” column in the DM Review. Mr. English’s widely acclaimed book Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality, is now available in Japanese. Segoy - ne!

T3: Developing a High-Quality Data Resource to Support Information Needs  
Michael H. Brackett           
Consulting Data Architect    
Data Resource Design & Remodeling

The rapidly increasing volumes of disparate data in most public and private sector organizations are severely impacting the quality of information that supports the business.  The quality of information can be no better than the quality of the data used to prepare that information.  Any improvement in information quality must begin with an improvement in data resource quality.

There are two major phases to data resource quality improvement.  The first phase is to stop the rapid increase in disparate data by understanding the bad habits and turning them into good practices.  The second phase is to resolve the existing disparate data by formally transforming them into an integrated, subject-oriented data resource within a common data architecture.

This tutorial provides 1) a review of the ten sets of bad habits the lead to a disparate data resource and how they can be turned into good practices for developing a high quality data resource, and 2) a review for the techniques for understanding disparate data and formally transforming them into an integrated data resource.  The attendee will learn:

Tutorial Outline

Mr. Brackett has been in the data processing field for nearly 40 years.  After his retirement as the Data Resource Coordinator for Washington State, he founded Data Resource Design and Remodeling.  He specializes in helping both public and private sector organizations develop an integrated data resource within a common data architecture.  He is the originator of many innovative concepts and techniques for developing an organization-wide data architecture.  He has written six books and numerous articles on data resource management, and is a prominent speaker at local, national, and international conferences. His latest book is Data Resource Quality: Turning Bad Habits into Good Practices. He is currently the President of DAMA International.

T4: Enterprise Architecture  
John Zachman
President  
Zachman International

Enterprise Architecture is fundamental for enabling an enterprise to assimilate internal changes in response to the external dynamics and uncertainties of the information age environment.  It not only constitutes a baseline for managing change, but also provides the mechanism by which the reality of the enterprise and its systems can be aligned with management intentions.  The objective of this seminar is to build an understanding of the concepts of Enterprise Architecture and develop a sense of urgency for implementing those concepts in a modern enterprise.

Tutorial Outline

Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

Industrial Age Break-Down

Information Age Build-Up

Reducing Time-To-Market

Implementation practicalities

Conclusions

Note:  This is a very ambitious agenda for a single day.  Therefore, the topics covered are dependent upon the time available and the interest of the specific audience in attendance.

John Zachman is the author of the "Framework for Information Systems Architecture", which has received broad acceptance throughout the world as an integrative framework for managing change in Enterprises and in the systems that support them.  He has focused on planning and information strategies, and on architecture, since 1970 and has written many articles on these subjects. He travels nationally and internationally, teaching and consulting, and has facilitated innumerable executive team planning sessions. As a conference speaker, John known for motivating messages on information issues. He has spoken to thousands of information professionals and business managers on every continent.  John Zachman is a member of the International Advisory Board of DAMA International; and a member of the International Information Resource Management Advisory Council of Smithsonian Institution. Mr. Zachman is a contributing author of Data Stores, Data Warehousing and the Zachman Framework: Managing Enterprise Knowledge  

T5: Building and Managing the Meta Data Repository 
David Marco  
President  
Enterprise Warehouse Solutions, Inc.

Creating a meta data repository that is accessible and relevant to its users is essential to the data warehouse's success and use.  This practical course is based on corporate meta data implementations and looks to provide attendees with a full life cycle strategy and methodology for defining meta data requirements, capturing/integrating meta data, and accessing the meta data repository.  The metadata repository provides the developers and users with a road map to the rich, strategic information contained within an organization’s data warehouse and operational systems. 

This session will look to unravel the marketing hype surrounding the meta data industry.  It will speak to the real-world challenges of implementing a meta data repository. 

Tutorial Outline

David Marco is an internationally recognized expert in the field of data warehousing, e-business, XML, business intelligence, and is the industry’s leading authority on meta data. He is an established writer and author of the book Building and Managing the Meta Data Repository (John Wiley & Sons, July 2000) and editor of Real-World Decision Support a free electronic newsletter www.EWSolutions.com/newsletter.asp.  Mr. Marco is also a columnist for Application Development Trends magazine, Database Trends magazine, DM Review magazine and is a judge in multiple industry solutions awards.  In addition, his keynote addresses and courses can be heard at all of the major business intelligence conferences throughout the world.  Mr. Marco is the founder of the Chicago-based Enterprise Warehousing Solutions, Inc. a strategic partner and systems integrator dedicated to providing clients with best-in-class business intelligence solutions using decision support technologies.

T6: XML for Data Management    
Debbi Walsh & Hal Davis  
XML Solutions

XML has quickly become the de facto standard for the sharing of information in the eBusiness arena. It has proven itself extremely versatile and highly qualified for data interchange, interoperability, and integration. XML enables legacy data from relational databases and other files to be migrated into future applications. It integrates this structured data also with unstructured data in text documents, reports, email, graphics, images, audio and video files to present new application and knowledge management opportunities for the new millennium. For example, XML, XSL and XLL allow the easy integration of dissimilar systems for multiple worldwide customers and suppliers in any industry. It permits the ready integration of those systems, regardless of whether they are legacy systems and databases, current EDI systems or Electronic Commerce.

XML is also used to build Corporate Portals or Enterprise Portals, the next evolutionary step for Data Warehouses and Data Marts. XML sets the technology direction for Metadata, Data Management, Business Rules and Systems Reengineering. XML will become a vital technology for Systems Development. However, the extensibility mechanism in XML, while being its greatest asset, is well on its way to creating data management chaos. How can we harness this incredible proliferation of new vocabularies and document structures using a metadata approach? Moreover how can that metadata be leveraged to integrate "legacy" data and software with our eBusiness systems?

Tutorial Outline

As Technical Director in Global Delivery Services, Debbi Walsh manages the infrastructure and practice methodology at XMLSolutions. She has extensive experience in the area of semantics and metadata architecture.  With over twenty years in Information Systems, Debbi’s experience includes several years of information and metadata management as both a software vendor and a customer of software products.  She has worked on the implementation of metadata repositories of at least fifty global 2000 companies.   Debbi has developed and presented formal training to customers worldwide.  

Hal Davis is Services Manager at XMLSolutions Corporation, and manages client implementation of products and services. With over fifteen years in Information Systems, his areas of expertise include data warehousing, systems integration, decision support systems, and metadata management. Mr. Davis has led numerous European, South American, and Asian consulting implementation projects related to data warehousing, metadata management, and XML-based systems, and in addition, has extensive experience in financial industry reporting and banking application implementation.

T7: Application and Data Integration 
 Implementing Model-Driven Architectures using UML, CWM, XML and the Internet
 Sridhar Iyengar  
Unisys Fellow  
Unisys Corporation  

While the industry is headed full steam ahead in terms of using XML as a core technology for E-business application integration, less attention has been paid to software development and deployment methodologies for E-business. The OMG XMI - XML Metadata Interchange fills this gap by unifying three core technologies:

XMI allows a developer to model and design an E-business application using UML and to automatically generate XML DTDs (and soon XML Schemas) as well as XML documents that retain the rich semantics of UML while delivering on the flexibility and extensibility of XML. Efforts are underway to standardize automatic generation of EJB, COM and CORBA as well.

The Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) is a specification that describes metadata interchange among data warehousing, business intelligence, knowledge management and portal technologies. The OMG Meta-Object Facility (MOF) bridges the gap between dissimilar meta-models by providing a common basis for meta-models. If two different meta-models are both MOF-conformant, then models based on them can reside in the same repository.

This session will provide an overview of UML, XML and XMI. It will also discuss specific information models and methodologies used to design distributed heterogeneous applications that are independent of any specific object middleware technology, deferring to implementation time design choices that optimize the application for Java, COM, CORBA or XML technologies.

Examples that start with UML and end with CWM, Java, XML, IDL and COM will be used extensively, highlighting a full life cycle application development and integration architecture that uses popular tools and middleware from various vendors including Unisys, Microsoft, Oracle, Rational, BEA and Sun.

Tutorial Outline

Sridhar Iyengar, a Unisys Fellow, leads the technology strategy for object technology products in Unisys.  Sridhar's current focus includes the integration of object frameworks, database, repository, internet and distributed object technology products for Unisys.  He is the chief architect of Unisys’ Universal Repository (UREP), an extensible distributed object repository.  Sridhar represents Unisys at the OMG where he chairs the Meta Object Facility(MOF) working group and is active in the Object Analysis & Design Facility UML standardization efforts.  Sridhar has also been participating in the Microsoft Repository design previews.  He has a masters degree in computer science and is a frequent presenter at industry conferences on topics of repositories, databases, component software and distributed object technology.

T8: Data Architectures for Scalable E-Commerce
Michael Stonebraker
Chief Technology Officer
Cohera Corporation

Business-to-business e-commerce requires solutions to a variety of data management problems in order to operate effectively.  These include:

In this presentation we describe the possible architectures for effective data management, including aggregating all data in one place, using a data federation system, and using a messaging system to exchange data among sites.  In all cases we describe how to handle a mix of static data (product descriptions) and dynamic data (price and availability).  Additionally, we describe how to support a range of relationships with suppliers from arms-length  (go to my web site) to trusted (directly access my ERP system).  We also indicate how XML fits into this data access picture. Obviously, any data architecture must be scalable. We discuss tactics for ensuring that a solution can scale over many orders of magnitude and deal effectively with peaks and valley in its load pattern.

Tutorial Outline

Michael Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century.  He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa.  All three prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science.  He is the founder of three successful Silicon Valley startups, whose objective was to commercialize these prototypes.  At the present time he is the Chief Technology Officer of Cohera Corporation.

Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services.  He was awarded the prestigious ACM System Software Award in 1988, for his work on INGRES.  Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1992, and has been recognized by Computer Reseller News as one of the top five software developers of the century.  Moreover, Forbes magazine named him one of the 8 innovators driving the Silicon Valley wealth explosion during their 80th anniversary edition.  

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