Ron Forino is with Columbia University as the director of Enterprise Reporting. Forino has spent the last few years providing strategic planning for executive management, primarily in the areas of information management. Formerly a director of Data Warehousing and Information Management, he has developed methodologies supporting information management services in data warehousing, data integration, data quality and knowledge management. He has been in the industry for more than 20 years as a programmer, analyst, architect and project manager. Forino has been a conference speaker on the subjects of data warehousing, value-chain business intelligence and data quality and is a member of the executive board for DAMA-New Jersey. Forino can be reached at RonForino@aol.com.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to help oversee a client's business intelligence project that was running behind schedule. By the time I joined the project, the requirements and design had been completed, and the delivery team had finished most of its development work. The ETL process was working properly, and several reports had been developed. However, the project had been stalled for several weeks, having made little or no progress. The reason for the delay was that each of the reports that had been developed needed to be "certified."
Approximately 15 reports had been requested for the first release of the system. The requirements team had been told that most of these would replace reports that users were currently receiving. The team was provided with a set of the existing reports, which were mainly Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The reports looked simple enough. Each column had a heading that identified the data it contained, and the team was told where the data was located. An estimate was made for how long the reports would take to develop. So what was the problem? In a word, metadata.