September Meeting

Meta Data Management - Mission Possible

For our opening presentation of the year we are very pleased to have Mohammad Rifaie who leads the Data Management team at Royal Bank. Mohammad will introduce the audience to Royal Bank of Canada's repository implementation strategy and its role in applications development, applications support and systems maintenance. Data Warehousing development and Data Quality initiatives will be reviewed, and he will share with audience many lessons he has learned from his experiences.

Mohammad Rifaie is a well known speaker at conferences across North America on data quality, metadata management and data sharing. Mohammad recently received, on behalf of the Royal Bank, the Platinum Technologies Meta Data Management Award for 1997 - a software Governor General's Award.

The ultimate success of a Data Warehouse is measured by the trust or degree of confidence which users have in the answers returned from queries, data mining and OLAP. The care and attention given to data transformation during initial loading and on-going maintenance directly determines the completeness and accuracy of the resulting answers. Karen L. MacInnis, Technical Manager at Vality Technology, will focus on data preparation issues, what can go wrong and how to ensure you data warehouse is stockpiled with good data. We will consider:

the need and justification for a comprehensive transformation of warehouse source data;
the distinction between different categories of data transformation (i.e. data movement, conversion, scrubbing, re-engineering);
the options for data transformation (technologies and vendors);
a methodology for comprehensive data transformation; and,
how to get IT and business management to support an effective data transformation effort.

Karen L. MacInnis has over 15 years of experience in application development and decision support applications. Prior to joining Vality, she served as a consultant working on international projects for a variety of Fortune 100 companies and at Cognos in a number of technical roles including customer support, product development, pre-sales and consulting services. Ms. MacInnis received an MBA in International Business from Northeastern University in Boston.

Meeting: Wednesday, September 10, 1997

8:30 Registration & Continental breakfast; 9:00 Start; Expected finish 11:00

No advance reservations are required.

Location: Howard Johnson's Westbury Plaza, 475 Yonge Street (one block north of College)

Membership: Attendance is free for IRMAC members. Visitors may attend at the guest fee of $20.