General Sessions & Tracks

KUG General Sessions

Welcome to KUG 2007
Donna Saunders, Owens Corning, Chairperson, Kalido User Group

Aiming for Excellence
Bill Hewitt, Kalido

As business faces a dynamic landscape of challenges and change, IT and business need to be in sync more than ever before. While many initiatives have been introduced in order to bring the two functions closer together, often companies still experience a real gap, and this lack of harmony can seriously impact an organization’s ability to get the most out of its collective assets. Today’s evolved IT organization needs to provide the tools and processes so business can manage their own information, with a level of consistency and quality they can trust. Bill Hewitt will discuss Kalido’s vision for addressing this gap and role in the solution.

Understanding Why Companies Fail – And Four Steps to Avoid It
Greg Hackett, Goodyear Executive Professor, Kent State University

Greg Hackett, founder of the Hackett Group and creator of the Hackett Benchmark, has just completed his latest research on why companies fail. The research showed many once-great companies are either disappearing or struggling to survive. And Mr. Hackett believes many current great companies may be next if they don’t follow three basic survivability imperatives.

Today‘s growing companies often focus on cost control, yet corporate profits are down overall. Despite millions spent on information technology for better information to manage the business, companies are failing or being taken over at a rate that has increased continually since 1960. This informative session will discuss the role of information technology in not only creating the problem, but also in delivering the solution.

From the Mire to the Miraculous: IT Ruminations, Observations and Expectations
Don Tennant Vice President and Editor in Chief, Computerworld

Don’t believe in miracles? Then you haven’t been in IT very long. It may feel as though you’re slogging through the mud sometimes, but more often than not that seemingly impossible project miraculously gets completed. If you think about it, there’s probably been more than once when you’ve found yourself scratching your head and thinking, “How did we do that?”

Computerworld Editor in Chief Don Tennant insists that miracles, in fact, pervade the IT industry. Drawing on his 17 years as a journalist covering the global IT sector, Don shares some far-out close encounters and takes a lighthearted look at some miraculous developments that provide a compelling glimpse into what lies ahead.
As Editor in Chief, a position he assumed in August 2004, Don is responsible for Computerworld‘s editorial operations. Prior to joining Computerworld in 2000, he spent eight years as Editor in Chief of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld.

Delivering on the AIM Vision
Cliff Longman, Kalido

How will Kalido help companies deal with fluidity and change? What are the requirements for an active information management platform for bridging the IT and business gap, and what applications does this platform need to support? Cliff Longman, CTO for Kalido, will cover the technical approach and goals of Kalido’s AIM vision.

New Technology Releases & Roadmap
Cliff Longman & Darren Peirce, Kalido

2007 marked a banner year for Kalido in terms of major product upgrades and new product releases. Darren Peirce from product management and Cliff Longman, CTO, will discuss what’s new from Kalido engineering and will preview exciting upcoming product releases and announcements.

Customer Feedback Session: A unique opportunity for delegates and partners to provide input, suggestions and ideas directly to the Kalido engineering team on future product enhancements and development.

Ask The Managers: A panel of Kalido managers from across the key functions in the organization will answer your questions in a special Q & A session.

Breakout Sessions

Managing Multiple Environments and Projects
Presenter: Lovan Chetty, Senior Principal Consultant, Kalido
Audience: Architect, Developer

Lovan discusses best practices for managing multiple Kalido environments to support development, testing, and release to production processes, as well as supporting multiple and parallel projects in the same environment.

BI Integration
Presenter: Mohammad Ovais, Senior Principal Consultant, Kalido
Audience: Architect, Developer

The session will include a closer look at the new Kalido Universal Information Director that you'll find very useful in connecting your BI tools to Kalido DIW -- all done in a graphical wizard-based interface. Kalido Universal Information Director easily imports Kalido metadata from the business model, generates the Business Objects Universe and/or Cognos Framework, and keeps the BI data up-to-date with Kalido business model changes. This new capability will make it faster, easier and cheaper to keep your BI users fuelled with the latest and greatest Kalido DIW data. So bring your BI Developers along to the conference to learn about this new product.

MDM in DIW Implementations
Presenter: Dawn Snyder, Principal Consultant, Kalido
Audience: Architect, Developer

Getting master data right is crucial to success for data warehouse project. Dawn explains master data management for BI, and presents design techniques for building a combined MDM and DIW solution.

ETL Integration
Presenter: James Dobson, Principal Consultant, Kalido
Audience: Architect, Developer

Best practices for ETL integration has been a KUG staple. This year, the session is significantly revised, due to DIW 8.4 bringing a host of enhancements that simplify ETL in a Kalido-based data warehouse.

MDM Architectural Patterns
Presenter: Hakan Sarbanoglu, Director, Knowledge Center, Kalido
Audience: Architect

Master data management is many things to many people. In this session, Hakan presents a coherent framework for scoping and solving master data problems, and reviews prevalent MDM architectural patterns using the framework.

Kalido Dynamic Information Warehouse: The Next Generation
Darren Peirce, Kalido
Audience: Developers

Kalido DIW will receive a major upgrade in 2007. This session will cover the detailed features and functions planned for this release and will include demonstrations and descriptions on how these new capabilities will enhance your DIW Implementation.

Business Modeling for Business Managers: Getting Real about your Management Information
Bruce Ottmann, Kalido
Audience: Architects, Developers, Business users

This session provides senior business managers a chance to understand the role played by the Business Model in Kalido implementations. We will show how real businesses are modeled and how you can use a business model to deliver consistent business performance information throughout business change. We’ll underline how this approach greatly simplifies communication between business leaders and IT and ensures a clear awareness of the origin, reliability and traceability of their business data.

***New*** Managing Cost Allocations with Kalido
Bruce Ottmann, Kalido

To measure true profitability by customer or product, it is necessary to take costs and spread them over individual sales to align them with revenues, and feed that information to a BI tool for reporting to show margin right down to invoice level. Using the data warehouse as the source has the advantage that it provides a very flexible method which is easy to change as the business requirements change. This session will include a discussion of the problem, and a demonstration of using the data and metadata in Kalido DIW as an allocation engine, based on an actual customer implementation where flexibility was a key requirement.

Birds of a Feather

Running a Business Modeling Session
Moderator: Bruce Ottmann, Principal Consultant, Kalido
Audience: Architect, Business

What are your favorite techniques for teasing out nuances in a business modeling session? Who are the key people to invite? What’s the right sequence for tackling a large model, by subject area, by dimension, or by source system? Learn from your fellow practitioners.

Designing a Data Warehouse for Change
Moderator: Paul Holloway, Director, Professional Services, EME
Audience: Architect

Kalido is easy to change, but what about other components of the system? What are the clever designs others have used to build a data warehouse that is resilient to change from top to bottom?

Getting Business Participation
Moderator: Winston Chen, Director, Professional Services, Americas
Audience: Architect, Business

In a data warehouse project - -particularly a Kalido data warehouse, business participation is critical to success, but always difficult to garner. Share your experiences in securing business resources and making the business side a full partner in a Kalido project.

Data Stewardship and Governance
Moderator: Yasemin Kural, Principal Consultant, Kalido
Audience: Architect

Who owns the data? Who can author, update, delete and read a type of master data? What kinds of business processes companies are using for data stewardship? Share your thoughts with other Kalido customers.