Industry research reveals that most data integration initiatives fail.
Common problems include
Late delivery and over budget
Poor performance of queries and loads
Unacceptable data quality for accurate analytics and reporting
False starts, potentially resulting in complete rework
Why does this happen? Can it be prevented? These are the type questions we think deserve your utmost consideration before you begin a large-scale initiative, or attempt to rework an existing solution. Based upon our significant experience working in this market, we believe one of the key issues underlying all these problems is an overall lack of planning, especially in regard to the technical architecture’s planned service delivery levels. With this in mind, Myers-Holum has developed a Performance and Tuning Assessment offering to address this need. We typically provide this service as a courtesy to our customers (i.e. we charge a nominal fee), providing us an opportunity to demonstrate our unique technical expertise and capabilities.
Our typical structured approach includes four phases, as follows:
Prepare
During this phase the approach, scope, deliverables and timelines for the
assessment are defined and approved. The team members, both from Myers-Holum and the customer would be identified. Other pre-projects activities such as
scheduling of interviews and organization of a team kick-off meeting help ensure a highly successful engagement.
Discover
During this phase the team focuses on establishing a solid understanding of the current environment and the business drivers and objectives this environment must support. This process is based on both a review of existing technical documentation and interviews with both technical and business staff. It is important to identify the key business personnel who can help us determine the business strategies, key initiatives and budgets.
Analyze
During this phase the team will identify the gaps that exist in the various components—technical, system, data and business process—of the environment. The type of assessment will determine the extent that each component will be analyzed. It is also during this phase that the team will begin to evaluate various solution options for filling the gaps that have been identified.
Synthesize
During this phase the team will formalize the solution recommendations. At this point, members of the team will begin preparing the best approach for laying out the solutions into an iterative deployment strategy. Once this strategy has been defined, appropriate project plans – schedules and budgets – are developed.
Additionally, the business benefit or ROI for each iteration will also be identified.
Typical deliverables from this type of engagement can include one or more of the following:
Findings and Recommendations Covering:
- Data Architecture
> Conceptual, logical and physical data models
> Partitioning
> Real-Time Load Dependencies
- Technical Architecture
> Hardware
> Software
> Operating systems
> Storage
> Network
- Data Integration Architecture
> Data movement from source to target
> Transformations
> Data Quality
> Data Cleansing
> Balance & controls
- BI Architecture
> Reporting
> Decision Support
> OLAP
High level remedial activities / projects to resolve performance and tuning
bottlenecks
We have so much confidence in our broad-based technical abilities that we have a standing offer to qualified larger companies. We will provide highly-skilled resources on a short-term, gratis basis to assist customers having large-scale performance problems. For example, we recently did this at a very large credit institution. At the time they were considering replacing their data integration technology. After we spent two days on-site, we rectified the problems and they are currently well-satisfied with their current technology.
