Tuesday, April 25, 2006

3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Level: Intermediate

Beginning in late 2002, MFS began developing a strategy for integrating and managing a wide variety of business and technical metadata. The centralized project team, within the company’s IT group, sought to develop an approach to store and provide access to metadata from physical databases, an XML-based messaging infrastructure, ETL tools, data modeling tools, and enterprise scheduling systems. The project accomplished many of its goals, but still fell far short of the “holy grail” it had intended to produce: a unified, universal Metadata Repository. Although not a stunning success, the project was far from a failure. Bill will explain the nature of the project, why it didn’t meet its original lofty goals, and the lessons that MFS has been able to integrate into its subsequent metadata (and data) management approach.

Bill Brooks has been modeling, managing and integrating data since 1995, beginning at CID Associates developing application databases, then at Children’s Hospital Boston as manager of the Decision Support Systems Group. He managed a team of Informatica integration developers at MFS for several years, and now manages integration developers in Regulatory Systems, Global Investment Technology, and Corporate Finance. Bill’s background includes traditional relational database design, data warehouse design and implementation, and enterprise application integration using a variety of ETL, message broker and recently, service bus approaches.