Many (many) years ago I trained as a lifeguard. Along with tests for life-saving techniques, we were tested for distance swimming and treading water. The long-distance swimming was a challenge, but the treading water test was my least favorite. I found that I expended a significant amount of energy to go nowhere!

Companies with data warehousing can also find themselves "treading water"—expending significant resources to sustain the status quo. Often this is due to a faulty perception that keeping things as they are is less costly than aggressively evolving and enhancing the data warehouse and decision support environment. As former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, "The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year." What is it costing you to continue solving last year's problems?

Encouraging innovation
To move beyond simply spending resources to maintain the company's existing condition, businesses must aggressively encourage new and creative methods in their use of information and the data warehouse. These methods include data mining, ad hoc query experimentation and rapid prototyping in a flexible and unrestrictive environment. Businesses can promote information innovation by:

	Creating an information innovation team and challenging them to find new ways to exploit the data warehouse for business solutions. The team members can be from one organization or, better yet, from various business and IT organizations. They should be especially knowledgeable about the data of the business (even if it is not currently in the data warehouse), the business needs and the tools the organization will use.
	Establishing regular "what if" meetings with key business leaders to brainstorm new business questions and currently unavailable solutions and analyses.
	Planning regular, possibly quarterly, informal reviews where the innovation team can present its findings and results to business and IT leadership.
	Not punishing people or groups when an experiment fails or has disappointing results. Trial and error should be expected during experimentation.
	Encouraging others in the organization to submit suggestions and recommendations to the innovation team.
	Cycling individuals through the innovation team to ensure fresh ideas and to propagate innovation from the team to the rest of the organization.

Enabling innovation
It is not enough to encourage and sponsor innovation. Businesses must also provide an appropriate platform and environment. Two options are recommended:

The first, and less costly, option is to isolate space on the production platform for the innovation team and give them read-only access to the necessary data. With appropriate safeguards, production activity will be unaffected by the team's work.

The second option is to use a separate development and/or test system. This will isolate and protect the production system and need not be as powerful or have as much data space as the production system. It is important that a sufficiently representative set of data from the production system is available for the experimentation to work. It is also important to use the same technology that exists on the production system, as this will greatly facilitate the incorporation of new solutions into the regular production processing.

Once the platform is determined, it's important to ensure that:

	The innovation environment is free of restrictive processes, policies or even assumed best practices. The team must be unencumbered and free to think creatively.
	Members of the team have the ability to create their own tables and views, and the ability to load, change and delete their own data.
	Errors, failures and uninteresting results are seen as opportunities to learn and improve.

Exploiting innovation
The end goal of innovation is business impact. Eventually, many of the new ideas, discoveries and techniques need to be incorporated into the production system. Here are some ideas to keep in mind as you track the value that comes from innovation:

	In some cases what is learned may be of immediate use but is not necessarily an insight or technique that merits being deployed as part of the production environment.
	If the result of innovation is to be included in the production environment, the first consideration is the data. Does the data currently exist in the production data warehouse? If not, how should it be added? Are changes to the production data warehouse required? Can this be accomplished through database views to minimize impact to existing applications?
	It is key to use the same technology in the innovation environment that is used for the production data warehouse. It is not beneficial to develop a clever use of technology or functionality only to find that it is impossible or extremely difficult to deploy.
	Recognize that "productionalizing" a prototype is not trivial. Because of the potential impact to production processes and users, the required changes must be subject to the same processes and change control that exist for the production environment.

Don't tread water
So, are you treading water or moving forward? The problem with treading water is that the business climate is less like a swimming pool and more like a river with strong and shifting currents.

Maintaining the status quo in these currents can be exhausting. It is far more sensible to use your energy and resources to move forward with these currents. Likewise, encouraging, enabling and exploiting information innovation will help you maximize your resources and your opportunities. T

The 'half-life' of value enlarge A fundamental principle of data warehousing is that if organizations do not evolve and improve their data warehouse, its value diminishes over time. How does this happen? As illustrated in the figure, when a new report or application is deployed in the data warehouse, it offers the potential for new insight and ways of viewing business information. But as time goes on, those insights—the views of the business—become old news. Few, if any, additional insights are gained. In a common situation, the report is checked every Monday morning, or the query is run at month end and, sure enough, what was learned initially is still true. But nothing is new. The value of the capability begins to diminish; yet the organization continues to maintain and support that capability. Over time the system will become full of reports and queries whose value has become less than the cost of maintaining and supporting them. For this reason organizations need to take these two actions: Constantly innovate and develop new capabilities, and prune older capabilities where the value no longer justifies the cost. —D.H.

Why Teradata for an innovative environment Information innovation is easy to accomplish using Teradata. Whether the team uses the existing platform to test the waters or creates a new environment, Teradata's extreme ease of management provides the flexibility necessary for an information innovation platform. Teradata promotes innovative experimentation in myriad ways: > Creating and dropping database objects and managing the data within those objects is simple because the team doesn't need to manage physical disk or data objects. > The ability to create separate, nested logical databases and robust support for workload management can help isolate the innovation environment from the production processing if the same platform is used for both. > Database views simplify rapid prototyping and provide a way to incorporate new capabilities into the production data warehouse. > Parallel processing-based performance and a proven cost-based optimizer make handling ad hoc queries simple and allow the highest degree of query freedom. > The team can use what is most appropriate for its work because there is no assumed or required particular type of data schema design. —D.H.

Photography by fotosearch

Teradata Magazine-March 2008