Data Management
Bedtime Stories
Paul Boal
Director - Solution Delivery
Sisters of Mercy Health System
May 5, 2010
Fables & Morals
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Stories
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Once Upon a Consolidation
And Never the Data Shall Meet
Work Smarter not Harder
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Lessons
 Resources
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Once Upon a Consolidation
Once upon a time there was a group of women that went
around starting health care facilities. They traveled
from place to place, seeing needs and providing the
services needed in the communities they met. The
facilities, having grown up in different places, barely
knew that they were related.
One day, a big, bad wolf moved into the forest where all
of the facilities lived. He wanted to blow down their
houses and eat them up.
The women realized that they needed to do something to
protect the facilities from the big, bad wolf…
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Once Upon a Consolidation
At first, they thought they could keep the facilities safe if
they gave them all the same name. But the big bad
wolf wasn't fooled. He could see that they still didn't
communicate with each other or do anything the same
way.
Then, the women thought they could protect the facilities
by using a single system to monitor them and account
for their behavior and whereabouts. But the wolf saw
that this was easy to work around; they were still
working in separate ways and not cooperating with
each other. The wolf was close to being able to pick
off the weaker ones.
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Once Upon a Consolidation
Next, the women realized that in order to protect the
facilities, they would need to use the same systems for
their everyday business, not just accounting. So, they
spent a long time and lots of money teaching the
facilities how to use new tools to do their work.
The wolf was discouraged… but when he looked closer,
he realized that each of the facilities was still making
decisions and setting policies very much on their own.
The facilities didn't use the same language and still
had to rely only on themselves for many things. The
wolf realized that it would be hard for one of the
facilities to help the other, even if it wanted to!
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Once Upon a Consolidation
Finally, the women realized that in order to protect their
facilities, they must be able to communicate effectively
with each not only with the women. So, they began to
work together, learning each other's language, taking
the to listen and share their own ideas.
When the big, bad wolf finally arrived, he was surprised
to see a group of facilities that strengthened each
other through their understanding and cooperation.
They were able to leverage eachother's strengths
effectively for the better of everyone and of their
customers….
And we all lived happily ever after.
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Once Upon a Consolidation
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Current State
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Goals
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Unified, agile, cost effective business model
Work Effort
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Holding company with 12 operational business units
Centralize IT support and funding.
Standardize and Consolidate ERP systems (HR, Payroll,
Finance, Supply Chain) and operations.
Standardize and Consolidate front office systems.
Investment
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$$$,$$$,$$$
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And Never the Twain Shall Meet
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Goals
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Challenges
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Understand customer-level profit and loss
Front office, back office
Systems implementation / roll-out
Solution Options
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Re-configure
Cross-reference
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Work Smarter Not Harder
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Current State
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Goals
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Provide up to date forecasts on productivity and a tool to allow
managers to model the impact of potential planning changes.
Result
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Department managers manage productivity target
retrospectively
The "Daily Productivity Tool"
Challenges
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What to measure
How to measure it
To calculate it or let it be reported
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Lessons
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Guiding principles for data management
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Data is an enterprise asset
 Data must be managed
 Most data issues are not local in nature:
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Reuse of data
Connections and relationships
Managing data is not like managing a business
process; data is in the in-between places of
business processes.
Strive for spending 20% collecting, 80% analyzing
(not the other way around)
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Some valuable resources
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Data Modeling for the Business - Hoberman
TDWI - http://www.tdwi.org
TDAN - http://www.tdan.com
B-Eye-Network - http://www.b-eye-network.com
Twitter - http://twibes.com (BusinessIntelligence, datamgmt, dataquality, BI-DW)
MIKE 2.0 - http://mike2.openmethodology.org (also on Facebook)
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Value of Integrated Information
One system or subject area alone does
have value.
When you integrate subject areas
together in the same system, you
gain not only the value of the other
data but also the value of the
relationships between the subject
area.
The value of integrated data grows
exponentially relative to the increase
in number of subject areas.
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The Information Supply Chain
All of the business processes that are necessary to:
Collect data on business transactions.
Transform the data into knowledge [1].
Distribute the information to decision makers.
Take action.
[1] Ackoff's Hierarchy:
Data
Information
Knowledge
Wisdom
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The Information Value Curve
One variable in the value equation for a
particular business decision is
latency, the amount of time between
a business event and the reaction to
that event.
Decreasing that delay from monthly to
weekly to daily to immediately
increases the value of that decision.
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Mercy DW Guiding Principles
CAVEAT: We haven't always and don't always follow these, but they steer solutions and discussion.
1.
The value of data is more than the sum of the parts.
2.
The cost of data is the effort and loss of quality in moving it between systems.
3.
Value doesn't count unless users can get to the data.
4.
Users don't know what they want.
5.
Users don't know how the data in their systems works.
6.
Touch It, Take It, and Don't Throw It Away!
7.
Copying data is expensive. Recopying data even more so.
8.
Data Warehouses are generalized toward information; Data Marts are specific
to business questions.
9.
Always test and validate assumptions about data and get at the data as close
to the originating transaction as possible.
10.
Keep asking: "and then what?"
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