Sydney Water taps BI specialist

The state-owned utility has called tenders for an supplier to help deliver a range of BI solutions services as part of a wider BI program. Sydney Water has already engaged services consultancy Oakton to help deliver the program as a whole.

Operating as a prime contractor and in partnership with Sydney Water's IT operation, the supplier would help deliver a raft of services, including BI operations and support, enhancement and project services.

Specific tasks would include: establishment and management of a BI environment including data warehouse, extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tools, data marts, reporting and analysis tools; delivery of operations and support services such as help desks and incident management; enhancement and maintenance with budget and governance framework and delivery of projects.

One of these projects is ensuring data on water quality reporting -- collated and analysed by a monitoring unit -- is brought into a BI environment, making use of data warehouse and BI infrastructure.

The successful tenderer would have to build 40 report/analysis types of medium to complex complexity, according to the tender. Around 140 scientific users would be trained to use the upgraded system.

Another project, IICATS (Integrated Instrumentation, Control, Automation and Telemetry System), will see Sydney Water's hydraulics monitoring data migrated from locally developed spreadsheets to a structured BI platform.

"Accessing historical information is time consuming," said the tender, "because of difficulties in processing large data volumes and also technical deficiencies of existing solutions.

"There is little commonality in reports and analysis techniques across the IICATS community."

The project would deliver new analytical/reporting systems for regulatory reporting and hydraulic system performance/impact monitoring, according to the tender.

Initial data volumes for the project would be around 800 gigabytes.

While Sydney Water has not chosen the tools and technologies to be used in the development of its BI program, it has narrowed these down.

Under consideration are: for the database management system -- IBM's DB2 and Oracle 10g, for BI reporting and analysis -- Cognos 8 Business Intelligence suite and Business Objects XI suite, and for bulk data integration tools -- Informatica Powercentre 8, IBM Websphere Datastage, Business Objects Data Integrator, Sunopsis, and Sun SeeBeyond ICAN ETL. Unicorn's Unicorn System has already been chosen as the metadata management tool.

Sydney Water provides drinking water, wastewater and stormwater services to four million Sydney, Blue Mountains and Illawarra residents. The organisation has over 3,500 staff.