DAMA INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM and WILSHIRE META-DATA CONFERENCE
April 28-May 2, 2002 – San Antonio Convention Center, San Antonio, Texas
Agenda is subject to change.    

W1: You Can’t Cost-Justify Architecture!

John A. Zachman
President
Zachman International

Most people still think that the way to acquire funding for new systems is "cost-justification." I would suggest that this is a vestige of the past … the Industrial Age. The game has changed!! We are now clearly well into the Information Age and the value proposition for systems has radically changed. Now Architecture ... Enterprise Architecture ... plays a central role in providing value to the Enterprise. There are four reasons why you "do" Architecture including alignment, integration, change management and reduced time to market. Without Architecture, there is NO WAY you can do any of these things. This presentation begins with a brief tutorial on the Framework for Enterprise Architecture to define what Enterprise Architecture is, and then develops the logic as to its value to the Information Age Enterprise.

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.

W2: Developing Useful Use Cases: How to Avoid the “Useless Case” Phenomenon

Alec Sharp
Clariteq Systems Consulting Ltd.

The “use case” concept is appealingly simple – a “use case” describes a specific case in which an actor (generally, a “user”) will use a system to receive value – and has generated enormous interest as a technique for discovering and documenting requirements. In practice, though, the results are mixed – some organizations have great success, while others decide that “useless cases” is a better term. One source of difficulty is that much of the available material on use cases:

• is either theoretical or suitable only for small applications

• concentrates on internal technical details

• treats use cases as a “whole new thing” that sets aside techniques the business analyst already knows and uses.

This workshop will take a different and more pragmatic approach – it covers proven techniques for developing use cases, focuses on discovering and verifying the user’s requirements, and puts use cases into context with other popular techniques like data or workflow modeling. 

• Requirements definition - goals, issues, and how use cases help

• Use cases - essential elements, evolution, context, and fit with data modeling

• Techniques for discovering an application's use cases

• How to describe (document) use cases at "scope", "concept", and "detail" levels

• Improving use cases with use case scenarios

• Where to now? - interesting uses of use cases, and other techniques to explore

• Wrap up, pitfalls, and key guidelines for success

Attendees will learn:

• The common pitfalls in developing use cases, and how to avoid them

• Why use cases don't imply an O-O approach

• The difference between use cases and use case scenarios, and how to develop and document each

• How use cases synergize with data modeling and workflow modeling and other techniques

• Proven formats for describing use cases and scenarios with progressive detail and precision (i.e., using Zachman's framework)

 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 his consulting business in 1981, and went on to assist clients with establishing Data Administration functions, developing large database applications, and applying model-driven requirements definition techniques. Recent assignments have included helping a leading provider of enterprise applications depict their applications using business modeling techniques, leading a process redesign effort, rescuing e-commerce projects that zeroed in on technology but forgot the business process, and of course, coaching project teams in the successful application of use cases.  Alec is a past president of the British Columbia DAMA chapter, and his presentations at DAMA symposia and chapter meetings consistently receive excellent ratings. He conducts workshops on topics such as Data Modeling (introductory and advanced,) Workflow Process Modeling, Use Cases, and Facilitation & Presentation Skills throughout North America, and in Europe and Asia.

W3: Universal Data Models to Jump-Start and Quality Assure Your Efforts

Len Silverston
President
Universal Data Models, LLC

While critically important, data modeling and data warehouse design can be costly, time consuming and error prone. One reason for this is that many standard data model and data warehouse constructs are being modeled over and over again in various organizations, instead of re-using common data constructs that have already been proven to be effective.

In this interactive tutorial, Len Silverston will share some of the most useful and important data constructs based upon extensive analysis from his newly revised two volume “The Data Model Resource Book” series, which provides hundreds of re-usable data models and data warehouse designs. Mr. Silverston will point out data modeling pitfalls and provide practical, innovative, and high quality data models that have been used by a great number of organizations to build integrated data architectures and high quality databases and data warehouses.

This interactive tutorial will provide:

• A toolkit of the latest “Universal Data Models” that can be used to save time and quality assure many common data model and data warehouse design efforts. Concepts, issues, pitfalls, and real life models will be provided.

• CRM, SRM (Supplier relationship management), ERM (Employee relationship management), and other relationship management data constructs for modeling people, organizations, roles, relationships and contact management

• Product management models (goods and/or services) including product features and options, product electronic object management, and inventory management

• E-commerce and click-stream Universal Data Models for managing and integrating information about visitors, referrers, web content, logins, visits, cookies, and server hits

• Common data warehouse and data mart designs for sales, financial, human resource, and click-stream analysis.

• Common modeling pitfalls and “War stories” illustrating consequences of incorrect modeling

Len Silverston is the author of the best selling "The Data Model Resource Book" series which describe over 230 re-usable, generic and industry data models. He speaks internationally and has written many articles on database design and data warehousing. Mr. Silverston has developed extensive software versions of his re-usable models, some of which are now licensed world-wide in Microsoft products. Mr. Silverston's company, Universal Data Models, LLC, (www.universaldatamodels.com), provides consulting, training and software that has helped a great number of organizations integrate information and jump-start data modeling and data warehouse design efforts, using his unique methods and repository of models.

W4: Avoiding Catastrophe in Data Integration and ETL    

Michael Scofield
Director, Database & Analytical Support Services
Experian

More and more, data stewards (DBA’s, data architects, data warehouse designers, etc.) are being asked to integrate data from multiple, dissimilar sources into a common database. This can be because of companies merging or acquiring each other, or the effort to integrate customer data from various applications to support a more aggressive CRM. Or, it can be when a data warehouse seeks to integrate cause and effect data from disparate source applications.

 Successful mapping of source data to target field depends upon a comprehensive understanding of the business meaning and data architectures of each source, and the target. By semantic, we mean ensuring that each source data field has the comparable meaning, scope, and normal behavior (not merely field-name and format) corresponding with its peer source field(s). Merging two sources is exciting enough. Merging three or more can be terrifying.

 This workshop will cover a wide range of techniques showing many practical examples of actual data. It is not enough to use documentation (file descriptions, etc.) of sources (which may be obsolete). One must look at the actual data - all of it. We will discuss step-by-step techniques for uncovering data anomalies, data quality problems, and semantical discontinuities in how a field is used.  We start by creating an inventory of the data, its architecture, and its behavior at each source, from the high-level view down to the specific, detailed behavior of each field and column, and inter-dependencies. Techniques in data profiling and domain studies will be shown in detail with examples of surprise findings. For example a field may be used in one way for one entity subtype, and in a different way for another subtype. Never underestimate the creativity of application owners to use a field for a purpose different than its original intent. Even the treatment of negative values (such as total invoice amount) may be different for different sources.

 Then, the task of evaluating the commonality of any pair of source fields, and determining the appropriate target field in the target database is not for the naive. We will review some mistakes of wimp analysts who made unwarranted assumptions about source data, without even looking at the actual business data (gasp!). In contrast, we will review sound analytical techniques for getting the correct mapping and translation to the target database. Also, data quality issues such as validity, complete-ness, richness, and accuracy will be discussed. Finally, we will survey techniques of establishing an on-going data surveillance program to ensure that later production-ized loads of data will not be caught by surprise when a source changes definitions or scope of the data it supplies.

Michael Scofield is Director of Data Quality for Experian (formerly TRW Credit Data) in Orange, California.  Prior to this position, he was Vice President and Manager of Information Quality for Home Savings of America (Los Angeles).  He is keenly interested in data quality assessment, and reverse engineering and mining of production databases.  His articles on data architecture and data quality techniques have been published in Information Week, IBI System Journal, Data Management Review, and the Database Newsletter.  His speaking and teaching engagements include DAMA-International conferences, Meta-data Conferences in London and the U.S., The Data Warehousing Institute, various DAMA chapters, and various database user groups.  He also writes humor, published in the Los Angeles Times and other journals.

W5: OMG Model Driven Architectures - Modeling, Metadata, Middleware and Mappings for Enterprise Integration

Sridhar Iyengar
Unisys Fellow, Lead Research Director
Unisys Corporation

The software industry continues to grapple with the challenging problem of dealing with multiple industry standards and competing middleware architectures and information models/vocabularies without much regard for software architecture and design discipline. The OMG Model Driven Architecture (MDA) simplifies this problem by unifying these diverse technologies using information models/designs and mapping these models to one or more implementation technologies (middleware, databases, languages etc)  

MDA defines a new software architecture that allows integration and interoperability to be addressed across the application life cycle and not just between individual objects or components. MDA exploits the strengths of Modeling, Metadata, Middleware and Mappings – the 4 M’s into a unifying framework with UML and XML taking on a foundational Role. The key standards and frameworks (some emerging) embraced by and integrated into MDA vision will be addressed by the speaker:

• Modeling Standards (UML, MOF)

• Metadata Standards (XML, MOF, XMI)

• Middleware Standards and Web Services Middleware

• Component Frameworks

• Data Warehousing Frameworks (CWM)

• ‘All-in-one/Über Frameworks’ (Microsoft .Net) 

MDA allows a developer to design a model of an application or component once and automatically map these designs to several technologies. A key tenet of MDA includes reverse engineering that allows developers not familiar with modeling to incrementally gain the benefits of modeling and software architecture. This presentation will define the basic principles of MDA, some of the core standards that are part of it and then show with concrete examples how this vision of mapping an abstract model to several implementations is realized. The benefits and pitfalls of this approach and early experiences are described as well. It is strongly suggested that attendees have a basic knowledge of UML, XML and Java/C++/C# (one of them!) for this class.

Attendees will learn:

• Principles of Model Driven Architecture

• OMG MDA Technical Architecture

• Using UML, MOF, XML and Java for metadata management

• Using SOAP for Middleware

• Using MDA for Enterprise Integration

Sridhar Iyengar, a Unisys Fellow, leads the technology research direction for software products in Unisys Global Industries – The Solution and Systems Integration arm of Unisys. Sridhar's current focus includes the integration of application servers, modeling technologies, database, metadata, and distributed object technology products for Unisys. He is the chief architect of the OMG Meta Object Facility (MOF) and the OMG XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) which together with UML forms the core of OMG Modeling and Metadata architecture – now a central part of the OMG Model Driven Architecture - MDA. Sridhar has directly influenced all the major modeling and metadata standards from OMG including MOF, XMI, UML and CWM in diverse areas like application development, application integration and data warehousing. Sridhar represents Unisys at the OMG where he serves on the OMG Architecture Board and the OMG Board of Directors. Sridhar is one of the primary drivers of the OMG Model Driven Architecture Initiative. One of his pet projects is the integration of UML, MOF and all the evolving metamodels at OMG and elsewhere to maximize the benefits of MDA. He has a master's degree in computer science and is a frequent presenter in industry conferences on topics of modeling, metadata, databases, component software and distributed object technology.