Jim Raper Quotations

Formerly, we could obtain equipment management reports only about once per quarter because it was extremely time-consuming to get at the information. Now our managers get updates on a daily basis. They can ask questions like, 'why is Vehicle One costing twice as much to maintain as Vehicle Two?' The sooner they can identify these issues, the sooner they can take remedial action.

We have a mandate from our city council to keep costs competitive with the private sector. We have to do it better and cheaper to get the contract. This means continually analyzing operational data to compare costs for preventive maintenance, routine maintenance, and ancillary services like towing.

We have a very open architecture for data warehousing and BI, partly because Oracle Warehouse Builder 10 g works so well with third-party databases. Oracle Warehouse Builder performs the heavy lifting with our ETL processes, and it minimizes costs by delivering data to a variety of end-user tools.

Cost plays a paramount role in systems and tools selection, and all IT projects are subjected to a rigorous needs analysis. If an alternative is very costly, it will most likely not be selected.

This new version of Oracle Warehouse Builder will help us scope out the transformation requirements up front, such as how much data cleansing we will have to do and what kinds of transformations will be required. This will allow us to accurately estimate how much work will be involved in pulling new data sources into the data warehouse.

Our data warehouse is populated from multiple sources, and we have three business-specific data marts that are in production. We picked Oracle Warehouse Builder for our ETL tool and Oracle as the database for our central data warehouse for both technical and cost reasons. In our evaluation testing, the total ETL throughput rate, using Oracle Warehouse Builder and an Oracle target, exceeded our minimum requirements by a factor of 10.

Our driving force is to do an extremely high-quality job for the lowest possible price. Ultimately, that saves our taxpayers money.

I don't see many (nursing) scholarships targeting men. If we're really serious, we've got to do more.