Businesses' IT cost-cutting measures often affect data warehouse operations, but this is not necessary in the current recession, says Barry Devlin, founder and principal of 9sight Consulting, who will speak at the ITWeb Data Warehousing conference in September.
The event, held at Vodaworld from 9 to 11 September, will feature a host of information sessions and panel discussions on the most pressing issues affecting data warehousing in SA and globally.
Devlin's keynote address will look at mounting industry pressures and what methods organisations employ to cut data warehousing costs in the current economic environment.
“In previous recessionary times, cutbacks in IT spending often had a heavy impact on data warehousing and business intelligence initiatives. In this recession, for both business and IT reasons, cutting back on the data warehouse should not and need not happen,” says Devlin.
He adds that a modest investment in new technologies, such as SOA and database management systems (DBMS), “can significantly reduce ongoing implementation and maintenance costs for the data warehousing environment, which could lead to higher returns on investment for the data warehouse”.
His keynote will also address the impact of emerging DBMS technologies on organisations from both an IT and business perspective. In addition, Devlin will tackle the issues concerning SOA and Enterprise 2.0 for the data warehouse.
Also presenting is Theo Spickett, senior manager at Accenture, who will look at ways of overcoming the most common challenges faced by local organisations in terms of data warehousing. He will also explore the contentious issues surrounding standards and compatibility in the data warehousing space.
Spickett will discuss the concerns over skilled resources within the data warehouse environment, as he believes data warehousing projects and capabilities are severely constrained by skills available in SA.
He says: “Many of the clients we work with have fairly basic data warehousing capabilities in place and do not build on the more sophisticated aspects like advanced analytics, data mining and forecasting.
“Unfortunately, these are also capabilities associated with data warehouses that represent a significant component of the value proposition of data warehousing as the more standard capabilities are absorbed into the line of business applications.”
On the subject of standards and compatibility of systems, Spickett says: “The data warehousing practice has developed progressively over the last ten to 15 years, with evolving standards becoming entrenched around architecture, data modelling, content and methodologies.
“A lesser issue has been the fact that there was never a 'golden standard' but rather a few good standards that were being implemented to varying degrees. Vendors tend to adopt architectures which favour some data modelling standards to others, and methodologies have tried to either 'boil the ocean' or focus too much on 'step-wise' elaboration of the content in the data warehouse.”
He believes hybrids of these architectures, modelling approaches and methodologies are the standard of today.
The ITWeb Data Warehousing conference aims to provide attending professionals with knowledge and insight into pressing concerns, to aid them in making business decisions both in the current financial situation, as well as in future.
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