Software Quarterly

Data, Data Everywhere
and Not a Chance to Think

by Paul Freeman




With Apologies to The Ancient Mariner

We live and work in a world of images and motivation manipulation, subjected to messages that aim to tweak the imagination of the reader, listener, or viewer.

Do you want to soar through the air in seemingly gravity-defying grace? All you need is the right set of athletic shoes.

Do you yearn for social acceptance, a big house, a larger salary, and a puny golf handicap? Maybe you're not driving the right car.

And then there's the software ad that asks where you want to go today. But maybe you like where you are, and just long for a quick and trouble-free trip to a place both near and distant. A trip to your company's or organization's data warehouse.

The catacomb of bits and bytes that can make your job easier and more efficient.




Making Information More Valuable

Industries from airlines to retailers are abuzz with talk about data warehouses and so-called "data marts." A new approach, IBM's Visual Warehouse, puts a seamless and user-controlled matrix on top the buzzwords. The buzzing has been created by the blessing of today's interactive business environment: the availability of information to improve the decision-making process.

Information becomes more valuable when a large number of people can get what they want with few impediments. Operational and work history has never been more important than it is in today's trimmed-down and ultra-competitive workplace.

Some people won't realize it was the philosopher George Santayana who penned the phrase: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But it's no secret to anyone that productivity and efficiency save jobs and build security... and recent experience tells us what history we don't want to repeat.

Santayana's comment was made in the context of war and human conflict. A more immediate theme for the modern office might be reflected in the words of an anonymous sage who opined that "every time history repeats itself the price goes up."

We create and store millions of corporate and organizational records daily... retrieving, viewing, or working with those records in methods that range from mostly efficient to downright unproductive.

But inefficiency doesn't exist for no reason. Accessing corporate data records has always been tricky, frequently requiring expensive training and extensive technological tools. But that day is past, and the IBM Visual Warehouse gives a smooth ride inside and out of a data warehouse.

The Visual Warehouse can perform a broad range of data warehousing tasks, meeting most any user organization's decision-support needs. And, in the context of large enterprises, Visual Warehouse can readily be integrated with the other components of the IBM Information Warehouse Solution.

Current financial data can be assembled and shipped to financial experts with all credits, debits, and receivables noted. The same database can concurrently be told to kick out an executive summary of data for company officers, all the while assembling a list of contractors for, say, the building services department.

Schools can give department heads the information they might need about classroom availability and the median test scores of incoming freshmen, while assembling (and securing) medical histories of incoming students for planning purposes of a school hospital.

Users in the banking and finance industry can sort through customers and prospects for marketing initiatives, without impeding the flow of checking and savings transactions, which keep customers' account balances correct.

And, scheduled data "shipments" that once required hours now demand significantly less time and work on the part of information systems technicians, making the end user more self-sufficient. But perhaps the most important aspect is what all the above examples have in common: In each case, technology can help users make better decisions.




A Lack of Drama?

The Visual Warehouse, operating in a client/server environment, automatically updates the information needed by many users for a broad range of business decisions. And all the needed data can be retrieved at any time of the day or night to optimize costs and network performance while providing information to the end users when, and where, they need it.

The potential impact of the Visual Warehouse on the workplace appears at first to be undramatic, which is part of its strength. After all, a FAX machine didn't appear to be a dramatic improvement on the office copier, until people needed to get a copy across town -- or across the country!

Whether implemented as an adjunct to a host-centric or local area network- (LAN-) centric client/server environment, the Visual Warehouse acts as each user's agent to gather, store, and structure the data needed by that user to make decisions based on the best, most current information available.

One early Visual Warehouse installation is at the University of Missouri, the showcase educational institution of the Show Me State. UM is a four-campus education system with some 50,000 students and around 10,000 faculty and staff. There are more than 700 departments in the UM system. While UM's goal is preparing students for tomorrow, worrying about "today" is critical to such a large entity.






Linsey Williams, MIS director at the University of Missouri, is an early user of IBM's Visual Warehouse, a comprehensive data mart solution.


Linsey Williams, MIS director at the University of Missouri is reminded daily of the need for a coherent system that can give departments or individual staff members the information they need. Earlier installation of an extensive host- and LAN-based implementation was helpful, but failed to produce the "end-to-end" data warehouse solution that a wide variety of people could use.

Williams turned to IBM when he learned that a comprehensive datamart solution program was being developed, providing valuable input into the shape and scope of the Visual Warehouse. Today, Williams admits to amazement at the amount of time it took to get the completed Visual Warehouse up and running on the University of Missouri system; he'd blocked out an entire week for the project, which took just two days.

Williams and the other people in the university's MIS shop now are able to satisfy a panoply of user data needs -- from the departmental secretary who might need to know the names and zip codes of students, to the hospital records department that needs listings that include medical histories. Since the solution is largely transparent to the user, classes can be codified, historical records can be checked, and business can proceed apace without direct involvement by MIS professionals. "I wanted to get out of the business of writing programs to go into the mainframe and extract specific data for specific purposes," Williams says.




A Look in the Mirror?

The situation at the University of Missouri is mirrored in thousands of corporations. Like most businesses, the university already had all of the information needed to manage its far-flung functions.

It resided on a host system, but was almost entirely in non-relational databases and thus was accessible one record at a time and only to users who were computer professionals. That was too narrow a client base for good decision making and information management. The Missouri systems were based predominantly on Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) and Information Management System (IMS). While VSAM and IMS are tried-and-true computing workhorses, they were developed when the prevailing technology didn't need to support hundreds of users asking for a multiplicity of items to do a plethora of jobs.

The initial Visual Warehouse at Missouri used an IBM ValuePoint 486 PC running at 66 megahertz, with 48 megabytes of random access memory (RAM), providing both warehouse server and administration client functions. Separate administration clients needing less RAM were added later. (The specific configuration is up to the customer, since the administration client can be combined with or separate from the warehouse server.)

The administration client contains the definitions for resources and user business views or catalogs. These details represent the descriptive information that delineate the attributes and characteristics of the data in the warehouse. This is the "meta-data."

The first test at UM involved taking information from an existing relational environment and, without changing it significantly, having the Visual Warehouse program instantly replicate the information. The successful result might not seem dramatic to the casual user, but the test run effortlessly did in seconds a task that once absorbed considerable time and hands-on effort. Williams admits he was somewhat surprised at the smoothly obtained results of the Visual Warehouse's maiden voyage.

A machine running OS/2 and containing DB2 for OS/2 was set up as the target for the warehouse. "We took information from an existing relational environment and went through that set of software, in effect, redoing it as Visual Warehouse ran ... performing the same functions which we had already done manually," Williams said.

One person generally missing from the data warehouse environment is the traditional "sponsor" of a data unit. The pressures for complete information, quickly obtained, have eroded the importance of much bureaucratic oversight of data. The Visual Warehouse allows greater user access to data, while retaining the level of security and access necessary to do the job.

The Missouri experience has brought quick user acceptance. The primary change involved has entailed accepting a suitable "desktop." After that, the user has to become familiar with a tool that is capable of issuing Structured Query Language (SQL) commands to a database. Visual Warehouse supports applications running on multiple client platforms including OS/2, Windows, and DOS.

The Visual Warehouse server runs on OS/2 with DB2 for OS/2 and can store its data in DB2 for OS/2 or DB2 for AIX. Most decision-support tools and applications that use standard SQL, or the Windows-based ODBC programming interfaces, can access Visual Warehouse, with no modification to the application code. Such tools include IBM's Visualizer and other popular front-end tools. The user can also access OS/2 file-based data stored in Visual Warehouse, using tools such as Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel, and Freelance Graphics.

Data can be available with relative instancy, or on a scheduled basis. "Pulls" can be scheduled for any time, from any location, without the necessity of assigning a human being to make the scheduled inquiry. Or users can be given information on demand for the "business view" they work with.

Another key benefit is the automation of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual routines which are provided with consistent data integrity from period to period. Assigning a computer professional to watch a job run is productive only if that job needs to be watched, and the Visual Warehouse work requires no oversight.




What's Your Inventory Worth?

Accurate, current, and cogent information are the items of inventory in highest demand everywhere, every day ... and for good reason. It's called survival. The world's corporate bone yard is littered with the remains of once-proud companies whose people never caught up to the fact that they were losing money on individual sales and would never be able to break even by focusing on gross revenues.

Perhaps the most obvious market for Visual Warehouse exists in the nation's largest corporations and organizations. Forrester Research Inc. reports that 96 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies plan to implement some form of data "mart" or warehouse. But of course, many businesses beyond the Fortune 1,000 can also benefit from Visual Warehouse.

Easy and widespread working access to the most recent history of a company or organization seems likely to validate the view of American academic Max Lerner, who said, "History is written by the survivors."


Paul Freeman -- a veteran news reporter, editor, and novelist -- has served as a writer and bureau chief for United Press International and the Associated Press, and as city editor of the Ft. Worth (TX) Star-Telegram. He spent 10 years as a corporate writer and computer instructor with Texas Utilities Co.


[SQ][tell SQ] [get SQ] ["software"]

[ IBM home page | Order | Search | Contact IBM | Help | (C) | (TM) ]