Majid Abai is executive vice president and director of Information Management and SOA practices at Crescent Enterprise Solutions, a systems integration organization with 12 offices and 300 consultants across the United States. During the past 24 years, he has focused on providing enterprise IT and information strategies as well as implementation of major business systems to Fortune 2000 organizations and government offices. A number of his clients have been listed as the Top Information Management Organizations by Baseline Magazine.

Abai coauthored Data Strategy, a book published by Addison-Wesley, to provide a comprehensive road map in building a sound data strategy for organizations. He has developed and teaches classes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Majid is a member of the Ask the Experts panel in DM Review magazine and a regular contributor to CIOupdate.com. He is continuously invited to consult and lecture on various information management and enterprise architecture subjects globally. You can reach him at majid.abai@crescententerprise.net.

How can one show intermediate deliverables/results to the business uses/sponsors?
October 1, 2007

In stress testing the heavy burden is the expected volume of data that system can support (load testing) or is it more than that?
October 1, 2007

Do you have any idea why financial master data is not on the screen when MDM is discussed?
October 1, 2007

How much time is needed to clean the master data and get it on track?
July 2, 2007

Do you have a roadmap, preferably pictorial, to develop a data strategy or an online document that I can reference?
June 1, 2007

What is the role of an enterprise data architect?
December 7, 2006

What are the major components of a data management strategy?
December 6, 2006

Are master data management solutions mature enough to talk about talk about client counterparty and securities master?
September 5, 2006

When consolidating two data warehouses, is it better to create a unique logical enterprise data model or use master data management and a service-oriented architecture to enable query, reporting and analysis as a service?
September 5, 2006

Ask the Experts
April 7, 2006 This is a sample of the questions asked of and answered by our illustrious panel of experts.

After almost completing the first iteration of our data warehouse base facts and dimensions, is it reasonable to convert to an ETL tool instead of using templates to assure consistency and accuracy?
March 5, 2006