Data Solutions

ATD has developed a methodology for migration work which focuses on:

• Understanding the customer’s data in the context of the business practices
• Involving the business users. Migration is not just a technical exercise; business requirements and knowledge are vital to success, and the migration project needs to be closely integrated with a parallel business transition project
• An iterative data-driven approach. Successive incremental cycles of migration ensure any problems hidden in the data are identified, remedied and re-tested before the final migration run
• Use of Appropriate Technology. We use Microsoft SQL Server and associated tools to manage the ETL process. Our own software, XTLQuanta, is used for profiling, mapping, data cleaning and quality control
• Project controls. Our migration methodology is fully compatible with the product-based approach of  PRINCE2.

Most modern businesses have data in multiple sources from which a unified view is often required for reporting, data analysis, business intelligence and reconciliation. ATD provides the technology and services to meet these needs, on 3 levels:

• Strategy - reviewing data architectures and business requirements, developing strategies for integrating data and building the required tools for data analysis and reporting
• Planning and Design - developing a detailed plan and design for the data integration process and subsequent data analysis outputs
• Implementation - ATD is a Microsoft Partner and our chosen technology platform is Microsoft SQL Server 2005, one of the leading products in the data integration and business intelligence market. In addition, XTLQuanta, ATD’s own software, provides functionality for assessing data quality, cleaning and enhancing data, and a web-based tool for monitoring quality on an on-going basis.

Business intelligence has become an important feature of modern information requirements. However, it has brought to the surface the need for ‘clean’ data in order to get accurate and meaningful information. ATD provides technical expertise for improving data, supported by our own software, XTLQuanta. The major areas are:

• Cleaning and Correction of invalid or missing data, including the removal of invalid characters, correction of format errors, derivation of missing data and code translation
• Standardisation of inconsistent data, including abbreviations, misspellings and variations in formats
• Structuring free-format textual data into meaningful components, e.g. parsing unstructured address data into the correct address components
• Enhancement of data by linking to other data sources, e.g. to add counties to address data
• Deduplication of customers, addresses etc. using techniques such as tagging and exact or fuzzy matching.

Data Quality Management (DQM) is of paramount importance in data migration, data integration and the operational management of production systems. The importance of accurate data is growing with the increase in compliance requirements, the opportunities provided by business intelligence tools and the need for risk assessment. As part of our XTLQuanta software, ATD provides a web-based system designed for business users to monitor and clean their data. Its main features are:

• A system of business rules to define correct data and detect errors
• A process engine which monitors the data and rules, and alerts the users to anomalies
• A workflow system to manage the process of finding and correcting errors
• A flexible system to define the urgency and priority of anomalies.

Our experience of data-related projects, supported by our XTLQuanta software, allows us to offer our customers a data health-checking service covering every facet of their corporate data. A basic health-check is offered free of charge, and includes a review of the following items:

• operational data
• management information / business intelligence
• data warehousing
• use of data mining and data profiling techniques
• data transfer and migration
• reconciliation
• compliance
• data quality
• data security.