GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a
Data Warehouse project
Mattias Jönsson, Enterprise Information Management
Service Area Lead, GBS BAO
9 May 2011
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Agenda for the next 45 mins
 Short introduction of the tool - Why does it exist and where does it fit
in?
 Think before you draw - Abstraction Layers and Areas of
Architecture
 How have GBS BAO used it practically in a project? (Including some
examples of drawings)
– Usage of BPD after a delivery project is finalised
 Session wrap-up and Q/A
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Short introduction of the tool - Why does it
exist and where does it fit in?
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data
Warehouse project
Mattias Jönsson
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Think about your last project...
 Consistency of drawings/models?
– Did they all use the same notation?
– Did they all use the same perspective?
– Were drawings/models for different areas created on the same level of detail?
– Was it easy to identify the relationships between different drawings (for example for
front-end vs back-end)?
 Content of drawings/models?
– Did they place every object in a logical context?
– Where the drawings complete – did they cover all the areas of the solution/system?
 Usage of drawings/models?
– After build and deploy - did the drawings still represent all the assets in the
solution/system?
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
InfoSphere Blueprint Director
Vision • Execution • Completion
 A unique new paradigm for integration
projects, allowing teams to define &
manage the end-to-end information flow
 Improve predictability and ensure
success of projects by linking blueprints
to:
– Reference architecture
– Reusable best practices and methodology
– Business and technical artifacts
 Provides control and insight of the
information roadmap and its evolution
through a collaborative project lifecycle:
– Vision, Execution, Completion
5
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Overview of the interface
Palette free form
“sketching” elements
Diagram for a blueprint
•Method browser (displaying method content)
•Asset browser (browsing metadata repository)
•Glossary explorer (showing glossary tree view)
•Outline (zoom in/out view)
•Blueprint explorer (shows tree view of the
elements in the blueprint)
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Context specific
property view
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Top-down & business-driven design
Element in diagram
representing dimensional store
 Use formally defined business
terms to specify the key data
elements, e.g. for analytical
analysis
 Generate Cognos Framework
Manager model from these
business-oriented definitions to
even further align business & IT
Sub diagram
for customer
profitability
element
– Business articulates business terms
relevant for analysis
– IT starts from generated model that is
linked to the same business terms
generated
Cognos
Framework
Manager
model
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Accelerate and standardize projects through templates
 Standardize your approach for key scenarios (BI, MDM, ..) and
leverage recommended practices by using templates
 Blueprint Director comes with a set of templates (BI, MDM, …) and
you can customize or create new templates
 Templates
include a
standardized
reference
architecture
and
method
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Understand recommended approach through methods
 Understand the entire
method (all phases,
activities, tasks) related to a
scenario
 Understand for each
component in the reference
architecture related method
guidance
 Drill into method description
details: identification of roles,
expected artifacts,
value and links to manuals
etc.
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
360° view: project vision + business + technical artifacts
 Track if your project vision
and specific blueprint
elements are aligned with
– business artifacts such as
requirement documents, statement
of work, etc.
– technical artifacts such as metadata
of a database or
specific data / ETL models
 Manage consistency
over time through live and
always current links
 Open linked artifacts in tools
to view & modify
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Think before you draw - Abstraction Layers and
Areas of Architecture
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data
Warehouse project
Mattias Jönsson
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
The ”context” challenge of BPD
 Creating diagrams and subdiagrams is very easy – so is the task of
technically navigating a Blueprint!
 It is possible to ”borrow” objects from any place or level across the
blueprint, which will retain it’s subdiagram
 However: Without structure to your diagrams, it will be very
hard to understand where you are in the diagrams
– And where you will end up when you follow a drill-path
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Level 1 (Scope)
 Blueprint Director is centered around
diagrams and subdiagrams
– Think about the ”drill path”: What is the difference
between the current level and the next
Describe the scope of
the functional area in a
business context
(presentable to ”any”
business stakeholder)
Diagrams at this level
will be End to End
Level 2 (Pattern)
 Objects are defined only once, but
”borrowed” in other subdiagrams
– ”Borrowed” objects retain their subdiagrams, which
means that objects borrowed to different levels would
result in an unclear drill path
– If an abstraction level is consistent and coherent, an
object can be made to exist on only one level
 In order easen the navigation through
the diagrams it is important to:
– Have consistent levels, with a clear purpose, for
example:
– Define the scope, Pattern selection, Design,
Actual Metadata Object, etc
Describe the chosen
pattern(s) for this functional
area. This should connect to
the different guidelines/
component model for each
vertical. As well as breaking
down in detail. This level is
more individual and diagrams
will be more specific to each
vertical.
Level 3 (Design)
Describe the design for
the individual flows. Will
be diveded into two
types of diagrams:
Source to Data (load)
and User to Data (read)
Example of what IBM GBS used in the project
Abstraction Levels
– Keep the number of levels as low as possible
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Areas of Architecture & Intersections
 Depending on the solution, different areas need to be included
– For a BI/DW project, a good starting point is the areas defined in the standard Business Intelligence
template, which comes with Blueprint Director from the start
– (Data Sources, Data Integration, Data Repositories, Analytics, Consumers)
 For each intersection between the Abstraction Levels and the Areas of
Architecture - who is the audience for the models (diagrams/subdiagrams)?
– What do you want to show on the Scope level and the Data Sources area?
– Source system domains, actual source systems, etc?
– What do you want to show on the Design level for the Analytics area?
– Is it an actual report with it’s connections to data mart entities, the Cognos framework, an entire
package or a specific KPI?
 Also think about which tool is the ”Receiver” for the intersections
– Many things you will define, will very clearly map to one or more other tools in the InfoSphere suites.
– An ”ETL” object on the lowest level should map to at least one mapping spec (for example in
FastTrack) and at least one DataStage job
– A ”Data Element” should relate to one or more logical entities in a data modelling tool, for example
IDA
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Using the tool – How have GBS BAO used the
tool
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data
Warehouse project
Mattias Jönsson
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Usage of Blueprint Director
 In a currently ongoing Data Warehouse project in a Telco company, we have
primarily used it for:
– Documenting solution scope
– For functional system overviews
– For data flows from source systems to BI consumers
– Design governance
– Ensuring consistency across four delivery streams for Staging and EDW processing on the ETL side
– Documenting and managing dependencies across delivery streams
 Reverse engineer – data model already created!
 No method used in BPD – we have BI Method
 It is not the only piece of architecture/design documentation we have, but acts as
one central piece
 The project have just started migrating to Information Server 8.5, which means we
have not been able to work with linking to actual metadata objects
16
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Examples from a Telco project
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data
Warehouse project
Mattias Jönsson
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Data loading flow
Data reading flow
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
19
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Limitations
 Blueprint Director is still a very new tool on the InfoSphere platform, so of
course some limitations exist
 Some of the most apparent ones are for example:
– It is not possible to have multiple objects using the same subdiagram, which might be
desired if for example reuseable objects are used
– Having multiple users working on the same blueprint is a challenge, since the tool is file
based
– Copying and/or moving (Cut/Copy/Paste) between Abstraction Layers or Areas of
Architecture might be tricky – so think before you draw!
 We have regular meetings with Product Managers for BPD, where we
feed back our findings and questions – so expect many of the limitations
mentioned above to be addressed in later versions!
 (We are currently going to upgrade to Fixpack 1 for Blueprint Director, so
some of these limitations might have been solved already)
20
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Usage of BPD after a delivery project is finalised
 We are currently analysing the benefits of using BPD in a ”Business
as Usual” situation
– The functionality of linking blueprints to actual InfoSphere objects and metadata
assets could be ideal for the overview
– It requires some effort to re-iterate the BPD work to align it with the actual
implementation
– We have started to assess this, but will continue to do so over the course of our
ongoing project
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Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data Warehouse project
© 2011 IBM Corporation
GBS – Business Analytics & Optimisation
Questions?
Experiences from using Blueprint Director in a Data
Warehouse project
Mattias Jönsson
© 2011 IBM Corporation