John Giles Interview pt.3

John Giles Interview – Part 3 of 3

In the third part of our interview with John Giles, we hear his thoughts on changes and trends in today’s marketplace – and find out how a shark could have stopped him ever writing ‘The Elephant in the Fridge.’

John has always maintained a healthy, fun attitude to his work throughout his career – and as he enjoys his sixth decade in the IT industry, there is little sign of his appetite for challenging projects diminishing.

So, after more than 50 years in the business, what is the key piece of advice John offers a company when drawing up a data strategy?

“It’s the old business/technology balancing act,” said John. “I actively seek the views of business people, their dreams, their frustrations, and use their vision to drive directions to take.

“Obviously, I welcome those who are the techno-enthusiasts. In contrast to driving directions from the business, maybe some of these people may bring to the table possibilities the business would never have even thought feasible.

“But an even more important balancing act relates to the project scale,” he revealed.

“I love agile – but a lot of time and money can be wasted in stand-alone projects that don’t complement each other.

“Conversely, I would advise a customer not to be frightened to move until the perfect design or architecture is finalised.”

John has already talked about the benefits agile working can achieve – providing, he believes strongly, there is a data architecture overview that can make the most out of integrating information held in the data warehouse – what he calls his “town plan.”

And talking of increased productivity, John believes one of the largely untapped gains can come from working smarter with data – thanks to careful, selective and adapted use of proven data model patterns.

He said: “I hope that the ‘quality at speed’ use of patterns gains tractions – but I am pessimistic it will.

“As an individual, I’ve moved bit-by-bit from developing physical models for siloed IT applications through to engaging with the business to capture their enterprise-wide vision.

“As an industry, I am encouraged to see the same thing happening. Little by little, I’m seeing change from narrow-focussed use of technology to a broader, more inclusive partnership between IT folk and business folk.

“In parallel, I’m seeing tool vendors that likewise seek ways to have offerings that bridge the business / technology divide.

“I’ve observed data modelling tool vendors who have acquired ETL/ELT mapping tools and are increasingly integrating their old modelling and their new data automation tool sets.

“Starting at the opposite end, I’ve observed traditional data mapping/automation tool vendors who are now expanding their offerings to include business modelling.

“And I’ve observed dedicated modelling tool vendors working collaboratively with independent, dedicated data mapping/automation tools vendors to build bridges.

“So, I am quite excited – just like I moved from the physically focused, and very blinkered ‘let’s get this job done’ approach, to seeing the enterprise view.

“The tool vendors are realising we need automation tools, and we need to understand the business concepts – and we need to pull the two together.

“So, in conclusion, exciting changes are already happening, and I believe more are yet to come.”

And the use of Data Vault methods will continue to be at the heart of the work of John, and many more practitioners worldwide.

John confirmed that belief saying: “I will say there are two aspects about Data Vault that inspire me.

“One is its greater emphasis on integration – around business concepts. It should be business-centric.

“And the other – technology is now allowing data feeds instead of being monthly, or weekly, maybe daily for many years – now you can have close to real-time feeds.”

So, seven years on since first discovering Linstedt’s ideas, what excites John most about where the industry is heading, as working in the Cloud dominates more and more?

John pauses briefly before saying: “With Snowflake, comes near real-time ingestion, and with Data Vault there is the possibility of developing business alerts.

“You can have business rules that say: ‘Something is out of tolerance,’ and you can generate business alerts – business warnings in near real-time because of the latest, up-to-date data that is being collected.”

But while new technologies and products will always evolve, some things don’t change according to John.

He said: “It does not matter whether you wind the clock back to the 1960s and ’70s, or take it from today – there’s always ‘new toys’ emerging, and you have to look at some of them.

“I have invested a number of times in something that is emerging, and it looks like it is going to get traction.

“Without keeping a total score, I would say that four-out-of-every-five exciting new things that I have invested in have been failures.

“But I don’t care, because one-in-five is pure gold. It’s a constant churn of change.

“Some of the earlier databases I worked with were hierarchical databases or CODASYL. Then along came relational and I thought, ‘This might have legs.’

“I had not been trained in data modelling back then. I had only worked with what I had done.

“I started drawing pictures which were physical database designs and just started doing modelling, which answered the challenges and made sense. It was also fun.

“The biggest change for me personally was moving from physical database-design through to grappling with more abstract concepts – and then saying, ‘There are data problems – not just for this one little application the team’s building, but the whole enterprise has data problems.’

“The scope of what I was grappling with moved from physical for one application to business concepts – and business integration for the whole enterprise.

“And today, I think I am seeing the same evolution, the same shift of granularity happening again now. But this time it is the tool vendors.”

With two very well-received books to his name, John will continue to be a very-respected voice in any Data Vault debate.

But it could so easily have not have happened. It is impossible not to end with one of John’s very funny real-life stories.

John chuckled as he retold the story. “They have an annual Rosemary Island yacht race that heads out in an archipelago in Western Australia.

“I was with a client – one of the yachts was towing an aluminium dinghy with a load of railway sleepers for the barbecue that night.

“We anchored up and started the fire on the island. Then someone said: ‘We need some beer!’

“It was dark by then, so someone swam out to their yacht to get some – floating their refrigerator across.

“When all the beer was drunk, someone else would swim out and fetch their supply. A fun night.

“The next morning, its 42-43 degrees Centigrade in the shade. We were waiting for the race to start, and I said to Brian, my client, ‘It’s stinking hot. I think I am going to flop over the edge and have a swim.’

‘Brian’s a typical outback Aussie and said: ‘I wouldn’t advise it mate… you might not live too long. There’s a shark following us waiting for breakfast to keel over!’

“And to think people were just jumping in the evening before to get a beer, when there were sharks in the vicinity.”

If Steven Spielberg ever thinks of making another Jaws film, the Oscar-winning director might like to contact John for an idea for the opening sequence.

You can watch John Giles’ presentation at the Data Vault User Group on YouTube.

John’s two very accessible books on the subject “The Nimble Elephant: Agile Delivery of Data Models Using a Pattern-based Approach” and “The Elephant in the Fridge: Guided steps to Data Vault success through building business-centered models” are recommended reading and are available on https://technicspub.com/fridge/ and https://technicspub.com/the-nimble-elephant/.