Investment Bank Case Study: Records and Retention Management This major investment bank was found in contempt of court and massively fined for their incoherent approach to records and retention management. Up to this point the prevailing approach had been to allow data stewards to tag documents and systems with record classification information to aid in...Continue reading→

Investment Bank: Data Meaning Have you ever read an analyst’s report? They are full of strange turns of phrase. The phrase “we continue to overweight [stock x]” is not a reference to obesity or a lack of a weight watcher program, it means they like this stock. “… will continue to face headwinds”  is not...Continue reading→

World Minerals: ERP Conversion Feasibility   World Minerals is the largest producer of diatomaceous earth and a major producer of several other industrial materials. The infrastructure upon which their internally developed ERP system  was based had become obsolete. This included pretty much the whole stack: DEC VAX operating system, Alpha chips, the Rdb database, Cobol and...Continue reading→

Washington State: SOA Design and Ontology  In our initial engagement, we did a rapid but detailed review of 200 applications, interfaces,  current initiatives, long-range plan, and a new system being proposed. We found several  areas where they could leverage work in progress to speed up their new project initiative,  and several areas where, with a...Continue reading→

Washington State: SOA Design  The long-range plan at L&I called for organizing their future application initiatives around shared services and shared messages on a message bus.  In this project we created detailed requirements specs for the dozen major shared services and created an inventory of the key messages they would need to form the backbone...Continue reading→

Washington State: Secretary of State  We were engaged to perform a feasibility and requirements study for the Corporations and  Charities Division of the Office of the Secretary of State. In our proposal we included  developing a semantic model to help clarify the feasibility and requirements. Another key part of the requirements was to examine some...Continue reading→

Washington State: Entity Identification We were retained to help with this two-pronged project. One prong was to create a feasibility study to determine whether collecting additional data from employers would aid  in targeting workplace safety inspections.  The other half of the project was to do a high-level redesign and feasibility study on how  they were...Continue reading→

Washington State: Enterprise Ontology The Employment Security Division (ESD) manages Unemployment Insurance and Claims and have a very active program to help people get back to work. We were engaged to help them determine a strategy for integrating into what had become three major systems all geared toward getting out-of-work workers back to work.  One...Continue reading→

Washington Department of Labor: Web Services One of the shared services we designed in the Department of Labor & Industries’ long-term  plan was “Web Facing Services.” When it was time to implement this, they asked us to help them define the requirements and select a software product on which to base the service.  Our original...Continue reading→

Washington Department of Labor: Security The Department of Labor & Industries, like most organizations, has implemented security separately for each of its applications. The more applications you get, the more  redundancy is introduced, and the more likely it is that you are inconsistently applying the  law and your own internal policy.  We began this project...Continue reading→