DAMA Calgary June talk:

“Systematic and Repeatable Data Governance Implementations using Business Processes”

Thursday, June 22nd, 2017 @8AM
Meeting Host: Cadeon Inc.
350 – 7th Ave SW

by Alan Rezazadeh

Abstract:

Data governance is typically characterized by defining roles and responsibilities, decision-making authorities, issue management processes and a set of business processes to govern data management activities. Meanwhile, Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives traditionally have been used to improve efficiency and streamlining processes among enterprise departments and personnel. Incorporating data governance requirements into business architecture and organizational processes formalizes data governance into organizational operations. Therefore; BPM initiatives can be considered valuable tools to embed data governance into business architecture.

The author presents a discussion of implementing data governance program by the means of defining operational business processes in conformance to data governance requirements. Within the business processes, data governance requirements such as stewardship, clarification of roles and responsibilities, segregation of duties, and decision making responsibilities are embedded. This presentation includes practical steps implementing data governance programs and discusses the implementation challenges and possible remediation in relation to organizational maturity levels.

Speaker Bio:

Alan Rezazadeh has been working as a petroleum data governance and management consultant for the last two decades in Alberta, Canada, with a number of oil and gas companies focusing mainly on upstream data management projects. He has worked with the public as well as private sectors on many data management, governance, and business process improvement initiatives. Alan earned a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Regina in 1995. His recent interests are data governance and business process management.

Details:
For the first time, we’re meeting at the Cadeo Associates, Inc.’s Calgary Office – 350 – 7th Ave SW

Coffee/Tea & Networking at 8 AM
Talk starts at 8:15 Sharp!
Talk ends by 9:15 then Q&A

Our goal is to have you back to your office before 10 AM.

Our Venue is sponsored by Cadeon Inc.

Why does it seem so difficult to get accurate complete information? Data Insight isn’t just for large companies or at least it shouldn’t be. You don’t need to have a team of specialists either.

It is quick, easy and only 2 steps to insight.

To embark upon this journey of quick, easy and insightful access to your organization’s data, we need to find a better way.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” Albert Einstein

We are suggesting a breakup with Excel. You heard that right. Ba-bye. There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?
Excel has its place and does ok with some basic data management. The fact is there are several faster and better ways to visualize your data, spot patterns, and trends and get key insights into your data. Spreadsheets don’t enable you to see that flow from databases on-premise, cloud data, Big data sources, and other industry specific data sets.

They say nothing lasts forever – sadly this is true. And without really gaining that visibility and perspective on your companies data, your business will lose that competitive edge and might go the way that Kodak, Yahoo, and others have before.

Moving to a data discovery platform like Tibco Spotfire or Tableau will enable you to take advantage of the exponential growth in data and information. Cisco Data Virtualization works with your analytics software to take your data intelligence to the next level.

Excel Pros
It is tried and tested, we know almost everything there is to know. It can hold large data volumes if needed. You can do some quick sorts and filters and get some key facts about customers, operations or whatever it is you have data on.
Using formulas and macros, end users can perform some data analysis on the information. When you want to keep up to your competitors and start utilizing the modern forms of data analysis, you need to go beyond Excel.

Excel Cons
Excel brings along with it several downsides and complications for folks trying to understand their data better. You probably think Excel can share nicely, why not, it even has that ‘ Share’ button like all the other office applications. That is where Excel sadly fumbles, or rather the end user. See most people have their own naming conventions and versioning factors. They may or may not be aligned with corporate policies. Then there may be one person assigned to be the master workbook manager, who has the unenviable task of copying and pasting to make sure things are right – right?
It is complex to discover and see complex relationships of data. Typically, excel is strong with one variable at a time, but to sort through a variety of factors, you need a guru of programming in excel.
Combining and mashing data in Excel is time-consuming and laborious. Getting access to the current, real-time up-to-date data is a challenge in Excel. Cleaning the source data to have it just the way you want in Excel can be a risking proposition, now you are hoping or praying the data is even the right data set, most current version. Tracking down any errors requires significant time and detective skills.
You can’t exactly drill down into the source data sets from excel. Finding outliers isn’t easy in excel and when you do, trying to determine why that is can be a substantial waste of time with no clear outcome.

Taking this to the logical conclusion
Change is tough. People by nature get used to how things currently are, even if there are better ways that would make our lives easier. Can Excel still be part of the toolset – sure. But if you are trying to take your data analytics up a notch, to start doing predictive analytics and peer into the future of what might happen, then spreadsheets fall short. Asking the right questions helps to guide the direction an organization should move in. So using a discovery tool to look at a company’s data as a whole, and not in just small, disparate data sets, enables these questions.

Connect with us to see how we can take you from hours and weeks of time, lack of confidence and uncertainty in the data – to 2 clicks to Insight!

Call or email us for a FREE Coffee Consultation. 403-919-7399 or info@cadeon.com
www.cadeon.com

Cadeon is working with Tibco Spotfire clients to help them plan and upgrade to the latest Spotfire release.  Now that TIBCO is officially ending support for release 7.0.x and prior versions of the TIBCO Spotfire product family, it is important to understand the implications of this.  More importantly, to see the opportunities this can bring to organizations with new features and functionality.

Call us for a free consultation and assessment.  4034752494 or email at info@cadeon.com.

This includes he following products:

Cadeon will be exhibiting at the GeoConvention May 15-19 at the TELUS Convention Center

Come visit us at booth 118 and pick up your free gift.  We will be showing how you can leverage your data from your various systems using Spotfire Analytics to drive well optimization and cost reduction.

In the rapidly changing landscape of the oil and gas industry, both regionally and globally, it is more crucial than ever to share ideas about technical innovations and business strategies to help shape our future. GeoConvention 2017 will be a learning, networking and promoting experience for geoscientists and executives from E&P companies, service companies, the academia and governmental agencies.

Thanks to the CSEG, CSPG, CWLS and our generous sponsors, every year the GeoConvention provides an opportunity for several thousand delegates and exhibitors to benefit from and give back to the community, through technical sessions, special events, and the exhibition floor. Going beyond the traditional technical sessions, GeoConvention 2017 will take a holistic approach to a large spectrum of topics including financial market and long-term strategy, infrastructures, regulations, safety and environmental protection, among others.

In a complex and uncertain global environment, we aim at promoting collaborative approaches and multidisciplinary integration to help optimize the efficient and responsible development of oil and gas resources. Join us at the GeoConvention 2017 and contribute to making it an important milestone in this endeavor!

We look forward to seeing you there!

“The Rise of Data Virtualization and the Fading Glory of ETL”

Data virtualization is not new. It has been around for many years in a number of different guises, including enterprise information integration and data federation. It is only recently, however, that the approach has gained the recognition and success it deserves.

The feature of data virtualization (DV) that frequently goes unnoticed lies in its ability to provide IT and business users with a single high-level view of data that may be spread throughout the enterprise. This capability can dramatically simplify access to data for less experienced users.

The other thing we like about DV is the ability to hide complexity from the data consumers by abstracting and federating the source data making data sources independent of the data consumers. This allows IT to swap-out source systems without having to rewrite any reports or visualizations.

Please join us as Phil Unger and Niaz Tadayyon from Cadeon present a case study of using Data Virtualization to stitch together data from multiple clouds together and maintain a single unified source of this data. In this discussion we will define what data virtualization is, compare and contrast to ETL and provide a demo and sample use case of the many benefits including speed to market, savings in time in money, and many more.

Details:   The Bow Valley Square Conference Centre is located on the +30 level.

Coffee/Tea & Networking at 8AM

Talk starts at 8:15 Sharp!

Talk ends by 9:15 then Q&A

Our goal is to have you back to your office before 10AM.

Most can agree that you should care that you lost a customer and want to learn why you lost that customer. Yet, many businesses still struggle with addressing this problem. A solution is moving from diagnostic analytics (trying to figure what already happened) to predictive analytics (trying to figure out what will happen).

Predictive analytics is changing the dynamics of how businesses work. It is transforming strategies from silo’d channel sources to integrated multi-channel and device sources.

This is an approach to data virtualization that can including attributes such as rapid analysis measurement occurring in hours or days as opposed to traditional monthly gathering of data for reports, an emphasis on accessibility to business users (ease of use) and finally, a focus on prediction, rather than description or classification.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be. Getting started with advanced analytics doesn’t necessarily require a lot of resources. However, it does require ingenuity. Here are the first steps you need to take in order to make this organizational shift that will make you smarter, more efficient and stronger.

There are four key areas that businesses can slot into in terms how they use predictive analytics to turn data into valuable, actionable information:

There are three primary stages you need to consider to obtain organizational buy-in:

1. Gather Knowledge – Focus on knowledge gathering and market observations.
2. Develop Roadmap – Create your strategy roadmap based on business needs and challenges.
3. Business Case Project – Pilot and implement one to two advanced analytics initiatives to validate value and needs.

How To Go About Piloting Big Data Initiatives To Validate Predictive Analytics?

1. Find the quick wins to make better predictions and decisions.

• Uncover what business problems you want to solve.
• Get specific and understand what outcome you want to predict to run business better and what decisions you want to improve.
• Reach out to key people in the organization to identify problems that need to be solved. E.g. Marketing team would want to predict customer purchase behaviours or Finance team would want to analyse and understand risky behaviour

2. Research and map out the kinds of decisions that need to be made.

• g. Operational decisions vs. Tactical decisions vs. Strategic decisions
• Find areas where you have a lot of data and where there is some complexity involved in the decision-making.

3. Get started with one or two projects to keep investment at a minimum.

• Outsource some of the resource requirements to prove value and then move to internal builds.
• Leverage internship projects to drive data exploration and find factors that drive value.
• Onboard the right tools – ones that will address the less technical user and make it easy to create insights.
• There are a number of key platforms that are continuing to evolve. Some good examples of players that do this are Tibco, Tableau and SAS.

4. Maximize your existing evangelists of data driven culture shifts. More people are rising to become data scientists within their own area of expertise.

• People who have an understanding of the data within their area and have some experience with statistics but very close to the data in terms of helping to drive the decisions necessary to support the business.
• Three core skill areas are needed to build these capabilities in a team effort to round out these skills:

1. Business Skills – ask good questions, decision makers, know the constraints
2. IT Skills – high performance computing and data governance

• Data Science – data exploration, which analytics to choose

Having data is not valuable. Using data is. Analytical insights powered by data are changing customer expectations and corporate strategy. Use these insights to start turning your business into a predictive analytics culture.

Sources:

http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/predictive-analytics/

https://practicalanalytics.co/predictive-analytics-101/

Cadeon recently sponsored and attended the annual Energy Conference on Big Data and IoT in Oil and Gas Canada. The conference had an intimate feel with the core oil and gas businesses in attendance including Shell, Suncor, Encana and Enbridge to name a few, and highlighted a handful of business booths that showcased their solutions as related to data in the oil and gas industry. With a big push for c-level executives paying attention or focus in in on operational efficiency in the next 24 months, the question of the day was how to implement new data technology to address operating challenges and create a business culture where analytics and effective data analysis is core to the maintenance and growth of complex infrastructure and information system.

Cadeon’s CEO, Phil Unger, had the pleasure of presenting ‘Big Data For Big Returns’ at this conference and the content really resonated with people in terms of the disruption that complex data has to a business and how the continued growth in multiple user devices and specifically the Internet of Everything is to blame for this impact on operational efficiencies and moving to a more agile and predictive model. Key points that Phil spoke to in his presentation included:

1. The current state of large corporations is that they are drowning in data and starving for wisdom.
2. Cisco systems is predicting that by 2020 there will be over 5 Billion Internet Users and over 50 Billion devices. This exponential growth is disrupting business ability to operate efficiently like never before.
3. Specific to Oil and Gas, for the thousands of data points accumulated in 1 drilling project, the challenge becomes what do you do with that data and can you use that data to predict how long it will take to drill a well?
4. Point on understanding what happened and why it happened is part of this methodology that needs to be looked at to seriously change your organization efficiency.
5. The velocity of information is directly related to the velocity of profit. The answer to consolidating and driving organizational efficiencies is in the data. But if the challenge of consolidating information from multiple disparate systems is an issue and drowning in data, then it is imperative to implement a scientific approach to this program.

The Cadeon team also had the chance to interact with the audience at their designated booth and showcase real-time data visualization platforms that illustrate the effectiveness of their data management methodologies and consulting services.

Watch the video above for highlights of the presentation. In addition, our eBook called ‘Turning Information Into Money’ is available for free download.

Successful oil and gas exploration and production require complete information access and analytics drawn from many disparate sources, which often reside in separate silos and can be challenging to accommodate. For example:

• Databases for oil and gas wells, pipelines, facilities and production.
• Geological and geophysical (G&G) application data; typically, several G&G applications are in use.
• Documents related to each phase of well lifecycle management, typically stored in a CMS, file server, etc.

Engineers and managers can often spend 50% to 80% of their time gathering information instead of spending that time taking informed action that maximizes results for each well throughout its lifecycle. Some consequences of lacking integrated and correlated information can be dramatic, such as:

• Waste of man-hours: engineers and managers manually hunt for necessary data and content.
• Uninformed decision-making and reduced ability to maximize resources from existing assets.
• Delays in exploration and production activities.
• Inefficient or unnecessary expenditures based on “gut feeling” in the absence of complete information.

Recognizing this problem, Cadeon Inc., an Attivio partner, has developed a solution to provide easy access to vital analytics based on a complete informational picture of each well. The solution utilizes Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine® (AIE), an agile “Analyze Everything” platform that integrates and correlates all silos of data and content, along with TIBCO technology.

 
The result: Armed with unified information and analytics, oil and gas companies maximize the results of exploration and production efforts for improved revenues and business performance while reducing costs.

 
Discover more of our Oil & Gas Analytics solutions!