You probably started your business because you love what you do but didn’t figure on having to do all the paperwork involved or keep up with Government regulations. Hi, my name is Bill Austin and I am looking for an opportunity to look after your books while you look after your business. Given my vast experience, I might even be able to provide you with some tips on how you can actually improve that business!After qualifying as an accountant some years ago, I have spent a vast amount of time managing large databases for major organizations but now my primary interest is in helping small to medium sized businesses to prosper and grow.

Joined Sydney Water as a senior DW/BI Business Analyst to assist with their long running and successful BI program.

As a part of the NRMA, Thrifty were required to adopt the NRMA SOE which includes the full Oracle suite for their data warehouse environment. My role was to guide them through this transition process. This involved architecting a data warehouse solution to address their non-financial reporting requirements (the financial reporting stuff was covered by the out-of-the-box Oracle solution). This included the completion of all the source-to-target mappings and also developing the data models to support their car rental operations reporting (to be done in OBIEE).

The role of NeHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) is to develop and progress the national infrastructure and adoption support required for eHealth in Australia, as mandated and funded by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). Its major project is to oversee the development of a personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) for all Australians.The solution being developed and implemented by Accenture includes a Data warehouse component to capture details of the people who register for a PCEHR and the records submitted by Healthcare Providers on their behalf. My responsibility lay in the architecture of this solution based on Oracle tools (ODI and OBIEE) and Oracle database technology together with the specification of specific analytical reporting capability.

The Shared Services division within EnergyAustralia provides a web based solution to deliver graphical representations of interval readings from Smart Meters installed at Industrial and Commercial clients. They transitioned the data source for this service from the operational system to a new Meter Data Warehouse.I was contracted as the Lead Analyst on this project. The role included the mapping of the current data repository to the data warehouse and the completion of functional specifications to support the move from the existing Crystal Reports to Microsoft SharePoint and Reporting Services.

Sydney Water embarked on an Enterprise Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence program incorporating a number of iterations. The iteration in which I was involved was the introduction of customer and property details associated with consumption and billing data.I was contracted by one of the major business stakeholders to ensure that the business intelligence deliverables (utilising Business Objects as the principal desktop tool) met their requirements. My role was therefore to confirm the requirements previously collected by Oakton (project managers) and to work with the Sydney Water IT development team to document and validate the business rules required to support the BI application.The BI platform in use at Sydney Water is based on an Oracle database and utilizes Business Objects as the front end.

As a senior business analyst within the ‘Yes’ Delivery Team at Optus, I was involved in a number of projects including a Consumer VoIP project and assisting with managing a number of change requests for their ‘Reitz’ program which is a major revamp of their ordering and billing systems. Other projects which I was involved with at Optus include a Traffic Intelligence initiative to use mobile phone handover cell data to calculate and predict road segment travel times and a project to bring a major Australian retailer on as a wholesale service provider.My role in these projects involved the development of end-to-end detailed business requirements via workshopping with business representatives and other participants.

As the operator of the 3 Mobile network in Australia, Hutchison Telecoms embarked on a data warehouse development in conjunction with Hewlett Packard at the beginning of 2005. Whilst the first phase of that project (comprising primarily mediated network data) was implemented in the middle of 2006, the work on loading customer and billing data remained outstanding.My role at Hutchison was therefore to investigate and document the business requirements covering the areas of Customer, Billing and Customer Margin. This involved workshopping with Marketing, Content and Financial Management personnel and preparing Business Requirements Specifications. I was also responsible for the development of a Business Requirement Specification covering the reporting and analysis of a new web music product being released in November 2006. This project required the development of specific data structures within the HP enterprise data model which I undertook and the design of specific Business Objects reports which I specified.In addition, my work at Hutchison necessitated my undertaking a detailed investigation of their front ending CRM system (PeopleSoft) and their billing system (Singl.eView) to understand the internal processes and data models of these source systems.

As part of the National Bank group, MLC elected to embark on the introduction of a data warehouse solution to support the implementation of new International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in addition to setting themselves up for compliance with Basel II and Sarbanes Oxley standards. This solution was referred to as the Financial Reporting Platform (FRP) and was run as a separate workstream within the IFRS project.Having no previous experience in implementing a data warehouse solution, MLC recruited a team of subject matter experts to establish an industry strength solution. This team included myself as the business analyst, a data modeler and an ETL programmer. This solution comprised Oracle 9i as the database server, DataStage as the ETL tool, COGNOS ReportNet as the reporting/BI tool and the IBM Banking Data Warehouse Model (BDWM) as the core logical model. The primary source system was Oracle Financials and the project budget was approx 5 million dollarsThe initial goals established for FRP were to replace the existing processes of reporting of Expenses and Profitability throughout the organisation and to use the knowledge and experience earned as a basis for satisfying additional management information requirements.Specifically, this role included the the evaluation and selection of an industry standard ETL tool, the alignment of the defined requirements to the IBM BDWM and assisting in the final design of the FRP dimensional data modelThe project was completed and successfully implemented in Oct 2005.

Cuscal is the central coordinating body for independent credit unions throughout Australia. As a result of a national review of the Credit Union Movement undertaken in 1998, a proposition was put forward for the development of a centralised database of members. The essential element underpinning this proposition was the recognition by the Review Taskforce that the relationship between Credit Unions and their members is the foundation of the Movement’s present strength and the key to its improved performance. The conclusion they came to was that the development of an aggregated database (or data warehouse) was a fundamental prerequisite to the management of those relationships and that this development be addressed in concert with industry “best practice”.My role at Cuscal was therefore to firstly workshop with both Cuscal and Senior Credit Union management to define and document their requirements as part of a business case involving the extraction and transfer of data on a monthly basis on approximately one million members from over 100 of those credit unions into a central repository (principally for analytical purposes). The proposition also involved the design of the data warehouse repository and associated star schema data marts to support the reporting requirements plus the selection and implementation of a web based business intelligence tool (Brio). Following the approval of the business case, the actual development by a core team of 6 people including myself as the Project Manager, plus an ETL Programmer, Data Modeller, BI Tool Developer and 2 business people was completed in 6 months and handed off to the internal IT team.

ACW Software is a consulting company which provides vendor independent, end-to-end consulting services in the Data Warehouse and CRM marketplace. They subscribe to a Best of Breed solution approach, and seek to bring industry best practice in Data Warehouse design and development to their clients. The major distinguishing feature of the company is a Warehouse development methodology. It is the encapsulation of their practical experience in previous successful projects, and is used to guide their development projects, substantially reducing risks associated with new technology projects.As a senior consultant with ACW, I worked with organisations such as Westpac Financial Services, GIO, NRMA, Avco Financial Services, Credit Union Services Corporation and Employment National. My main role at those organisations was to assist in the definition of business values and imperatives that served to underpin the introduction of a Data Warehouse solution.