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Is that really a Source System?

April 17, 2008

Last week I needed to purchase a new memory card for my daughter’s digital camera.  Because I rarely go to a brick-n-mortar electronics store anymore, I headed to Amazon.com.  After a few minutes of browsing, I found exactly what I was looking for.  I added the item to my shopping cart and proceeded to checkout.  As I was entering my payment/shipping information, I realized that I wasn’t actually buying the memory card from Amazon, but rather from a reseller on the site.  No problem, I didn’t necessarily care who I got it from.   I just wanted a product that met my needs at a reasonable price.  So in this case Amazon provided the service and another vendor provided the goods.  Daughter happy = Daddy happy.

Take this scenario into our consulting world and in particular, data warehousing.  A data warehouse is a repository of data.  Data is collected from various source systems residing throughout a company’s infrastructure and integrated, consolidated, and aggregated in a meaningful manner for decision making.  The source systems provide the service, but is the data they are providing necessarily originating from them?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  Do I care?  Maybe yes, maybe no.

The purist will say that if data isn’t originated in a system, you should keep swimming upstream to the “ultimate source”.  In this fashion, you’ve reached the system of origin and life is good.  But what if this information isn’t meaningful until it is been run through the company’s legacy costing model written in a proprietary system and supported by Bob who runs “process X” twice/month and doesn’t know much more than that? 

Given today’s ever increasing pressures on delivering more value in a shorter timeframe, is it better to deliver the goods to fulfill the customer’s need or improve the service by which the goods are delivered?   It’s a balancing act of business value, effort, and time.  I’m all for improving processes.  The cleaner the process, the more maintainable it becomes.  However, my job is also to meet my customer’s expectations.  One of the biggest values in data warehousing is its ability to “Unhide Data”.  I’ve come across numerous projects that have spun their wheels in source system analysis.  Manual processes were perceived as bad and had to be improved.  The timeline for delivery didn’t change, as a result, later phases (design, development, and oh my gosh testing!) just shortened.  Was that good time spent?  In most cases, the final answers came back as “leave the source alone, it’s working”.  Hours/days were lost and now the team had to work harder and longer with greater stress to meet deadlines.  Because of this, I would rather deliver solutions in multiple phases.  The first phase delivers the quick value (no need to look at the man behind the curtain).  Subsequent phases can look into the feasibility of streamlining manual processes and/or swimming past the legacy costing model.  Choose your battles and move on.

So which is it, give me the service or give me the product?  The answer is both…just give me a solution that delivers it.

Dave

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Written by Dave Cordas · Filed Under Information Technology 

Comments

One Response to “Is that really a Source System?”

  1. Mary Shy on April 17th, 2008 10:47 am

    Dave, Your comments on taking a phased approach is so timely for me!. I just had a conversation about 5 minutes ago about the value of doing projects in multiple phases! It’s almost like you hear our conversation.

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