In 1996, Greg's orientation shifted toward the improvement of business performance through strategic leveraging of information. Accordingly, Greg has made Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence a primary focus.
Greg has been a regular speaker on Data Warehousing topics at the COMMON national conferences since 2000. He also served for two years as COMMON's Subject Matter Expert for the Business Intelligence/Database course of study and co-hosted the Business Intelligence table at COMMON's "Ask the Expert" event.
As a consultant for LDA Systems, Inc. a Northeast Ohio consulting firm, Greg created the business plan for and headed an AS/400-centric business intelligence practice called BI/400. In that role, he conducted DW/BI seminars for customers and prospects and developed a revenue generating marketing program called SmartStart, in which a fully functional, demonstration datamart was built from a prospect's sales data in two weeks.
The prototype datamart was built using Showcase Strategy as the ETL tool. It demoed COGNOS Impromptu and PowerPlay for visualization tools.
In 1999, an article in KMWorld titled 10 rules for successful data warehousing featured data warehouses at two companies who had each discovered different formulas for success. One of the companies was Lesco, Inc., a client of Greg's. (The section about Lesco is subtitled, The path to knowledge.)
Read the KMWorld article about the Lesco Data Warehouse architected and built by Greg.
<Read more about Greg's ultimate learning experience at Lesco.>
DW/BI Projects
Lesco, Inc. Enterprise Warehouse Sept. 1996 - Oct. 1997
Architected and developed the framework for an enterprise data warehouse and built numerous data marts.
Subject Areas: Sales and Marketing
Source Data: DB2/400 on AS/400
ETL: Custom RPG
Query Tool: COGNOS Impromptu
OLAP Tool: COGNOS PowerPlay
"Working with Wayne Murawski, the CIO at Lesco, was an amazing experience." - Greg
<Read about "Wayne's World" at Lesco!"
Cole Vision MDM
Lesco 2
ICI Autocolor
BPCS -> Crystal Reports
Lesco 3
Time Warner Cable
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"Working with Wayne Murawski, the CIO at Lesco, was an amazing learning experience. Wayne was a true visionary who had the goal of transforming every Lesco employee into a "knowledge worker". And Wayne was also extremely hands-on as a CIO. It was not easy for him to entrust me with the data warehouse architecture. For an entire year, Wayne and I struggled over DW design and approaches. At the end of that year, the architecture of an enterprise warehouse was well in place and Sales and Marketing data marts were fully functional. But the tension still existed. Wayne felt that my approach was 'too theoretical', and we parted ways - but not for good...
While I was partnering with IBM on an MDM project for my next client, Wayne's developers were populating the warehouse with one file after another. About six months later, I got the call for a six-week assignment at Lesco: Most of the new information in the warehouse was unusable and Wayne wanted me to take a look at it. My six week assignment turned into two years as I redesigned and rebuilt the ETL that his developers had put into place.
I then went on to develop numerous other data marts for Lesco. By the end of that engagement, the warehouse was being fed by every one of Lesco's transactional and financial applications and the warehouse ODS (Operational Data Store) fed the Ledger. This approach required that all ETL processes were 100% accurate but garaunteed the Ledger and the DW always matched - a perfect example of 'A single version of the truth'.
During that period, Wayne and I resolved our differences, shared a common philosophy, and teamed up to achive real accomplishments. We were truly recreating Lesco as a “knowledge enterprise” together. Wayne was fond of saying that for every new project design, “the data warehouse design is first among equals.” To me that meant that data warehouse considerations were a critical piece of every new project design. I felt extremely proud that even though I was a consultant, Wayne told his development team that no project design would be approved until Greg approved the data warehouse design.
In 1999, an article titled 10 rules for successful data warehousing appeared in KMWorld magazine that featured Lesco and Wayne Murawski as well as a DW at Westinghouse Security Electronics. (The subtitle of the Lesco section is The path to knowledge.)
Although the comments and '10 rules' came from Wayne, they, of course, very much reflect my philosophy. And the reference to '…the data warehouse manager from IT…' mentioned in the article, I am very proud to say, of course refers to me. I urge you to read this short article at:
http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/10-rules-for-successful-data-warehousing-9081.aspx."