Meanwhile, MasterCard does have to sell to upper management any extensions to the data-warehouse infrastructure, such as a new storage area network (SAN) for the data-warehouse servers that speeds information retrieval. "A SAN is a tactical decision, so you have to deliver a business case for it," Alkhalaf says.
Next for Alkhalaf and his IT group is to pitch to management a failover and redundancy architecture for the data warehouse, which for now is run at its main data center. "When we first put in the data warehouse, if it went down, it wasn't a major issue. Now that more people rely on it, they expect it to be up all of the time," Alkhalaf says.
It's all about what Alkhalaf calls information velocity. "People want to be able to get to the information more quickly," he says. "We are keeping more data and providing more subjects more quickly to more people."
Sam Alkhalaf; Senior Vice President, technology and strategic architecture division; MasterCard International, Purchase, N.Y.
Sam Alkhalaf, 48, is responsible for MasterCard's data warehouse and applications, as well as the company's internal e-mail, desktops, LAN, WAN, helpdesk, security and business applications. Alkhalaf also oversees emerging technology testing and standards development. Alkhalaf has worked in IT for 23 years, seven of them with MasterCard. He holds a B.S. in electronics and an M.B.A. in management.
If I Knew Then What I Know Now: I would have communicated the data warehouse's capabilities more broadly and more often to get it penetrated more quickly into the organization and externally. You have to communicate its functionality to get the masses to jump on it. I could've done more.
