March 7, 2007

5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Level: Advanced

Within the two main paradigms of integration, data integration and application integration, there exists a “data divide.” Integration Competencies Centers (ICC) were established to try to bridge this gap, increasing integration consistency and productivity by coordinating integration across the enterprise, and loosely coupling the two paradigms with data dictionaries, meta-data management and best practices. This has positive effect on integration consistency and productivity, but they suffer from a lack of an appropriate end-to-end role related tool support that limits their influence and effectiveness.

What they really need are tools and processes that naturally bridge the “divide” without the need of a large upfront investment or disrupting the existing work processes. A reusable, pervasive, executable transformation specification mechanism is the only way to bridge the gap between an ICC and the implementations in the field.

In this session, Itemfield CTO Peter Cousins will cover specification-driven data transformation, an excellent solution for bridging the data divide. In his experience working with some of the largest companies in financial services and telecommunications, Peter has been most successful leveraging the tool most comfortable and familiar to both business analysts and data modelers – Excel spreadsheets.

From this presentation, audience members will learn:

• Why ICCs cannot bridge the data divide
• Importance of specification-driven transformation for structured, semi-structured and unstructured data
• Definition of well-defined spreadsheet templates and tool
• Benefits to using Excel as a mapping tool
• Anecdotal customer evidence that supports the use of this tool
  

Peter Cousins brings over 20 years of software innovation experience to DAMA. Before joining Itemfield as Chief Technology Officer, Peter worked with IONA, where he led the creation of IONA's Artix product, a ground breaking enterprise-class ESB. He was also the creator of Level 8's EAI product, Geneva, which was inspired by technical leadership he provided to core projects at Bankers Trust/Deutche Bank, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Prudential. In addition to financial services, he brings considerable expertise in technology and business issues specific to the telecommunications industry. He contributes to a number of industry standards for integration and Web Services at OASIS, Java Community Process, and W3C.