American Airlines: Managing Reference Data in the Real World

In 2013, American Airlines began a major reference data management initiative to enable the business units to maintain a consistent representation of reference data across all departments and databases in their organization. The solution allowed for a successful collaboration between IT and business users. It also allowed the team to manage all of the organization’s important internal reference data in one centralized place while facilitating the distribution/synchronization of changes in the data to all systems requiring notification.

This presentation will examine the challenges faced when attempting to provide access to manually maintained reference data within American Airline's data warehouse. Craig and Yash will talk about their initial RDM objectives and requirements, present the main data governance issues prior RDM implementation, describe how these issues were resolved, illustrate the benefits provided by RDM, and point out the main state of reference data management at American Airlines today.

Craig Cargile has worked in Information Technology for more than 25 years and in Data Warehousing for 15 years. As a solution architect for American Airlines, he has been involved in Enterprise Data Warehouse development process, from inception through transition, and has been heavily involved with American’s EDW metadata solutions, including Reference Data Management. He is also the EDW’s representative to American’s Application Architecture Committee.

Yashodhan Joshi has more than 20 years of experience in Database Management at American Airlines and Sabre Inc. With Master level professional certification in Teradata , Oracle, and Informix, Yashodhan is currently managing the Enterprise Data Warehouse technology group at American. His role involves implementing new EDW technologies best suited with AA architecture policies. He is also responsible for Metadata Management, Security and the Data Governance program for the Enterprise Data Warehouse. Additionally, Yash is on the customer advisory board for IBM Information Server data cabinet.