W4: Inevitable Scenarios and Challenges In Data Integration Efforts and How to Deal With Them

This or workshop will provide tools and exercises to help data professionals effectively deal with inevitable scenarios that occur in data integration efforts and are usually the key to success. Based upon decades of real life experiences, Len Silverston will share scenarios that are so common in data integration efforts that it only makes sense to proactively and effectively know how to deal with them. For example, a customer master data management program may want to integrate data, but we know there will be obstacles such as when a salesperson says, “wait a minute, this customer contact data is my data that I have developed over the last 10 years – I am not going to share that!” How would you respond to this and/or how can we proactively set up this scenario for success?

We know these scenarios and obstacles will occur on most data management and data integration efforts, whether it is a master data management, data warehousing, enterprise information management, or other type of effort. Why not be prepared to effectively handle these obstacles and scenarios in advance? If an organization is not prepared in advance, people usually react instead of proactively and intelligently responding, and this usually ends up badly.

Most people in data integration efforts realize that the core issues are not technical – they are interpersonal. So how can we address them? This interactive workshop will share techniques that are essential to effectively integrating data. It will illustrate why some data integration programs succeed and others fail and what skills are needed to help data integration efforts. This workshop will also provide exercises where participants can practice these techniques and skills in scenarios that are bound to occur in data integration efforts.

Len Silverston is a best-selling author, consultant, and speaker with over 25 years of experience helping organizations integrate their information, systems, and people. Mr. Silverston is a thought leader in the fields of data modeling, data management and in the human dynamics of integrating information. He is well known for his work on "Universal Data Models", or in other words, re-usable models that help develop higher quality data models in less time. He is the author of The Data Model Resource Book series (Volumes 1, 2, and 3), which describe hundreds of reusable data models. The volume 1 book was rated #12 on the Computer Literacy Best Seller List and volumes 1 and 2 have been translated into Chinese. In 2009, he co-authored his latest work, “The Data Model Resource Book, Volume 3, Universal Patterns for Data Modeling”. Mr. Silverston has published many articles and has been a keynote speaker at many international conferences. He is the winner of the DAMA (Data Administration Management Association) International Professional Achievement Award for 2004 and the DAMA International Community Award for 2006. He received the highest speaker rating for the DAMA International 2009 conference for his talk on “What to Do When Data Professionals Disagree”. Mr. Silverston's company, Universal Data Models, provides consulting, training, publications, and software to enable information integration.