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Developer Q&A: Mike Burkes, Data Access Manager, Toyota
Q. What is your role at Toyota?
A. I am the Data Access Manager for the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) group within the Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc. Information Systems (IS) division. Our group is responsible for setting data standards, policies and strategy for access to and use of corporate data. We work closely with our Enterprise Architecture group to evaluate technologies in the data domain and work closely with our other IS groups to implement and maintain applications that are selected. EDM fulfills a Subject Matter Expert role to our projects (Business driven) that include data applications.
Q. What are the typical challenges you face regarding deployment of applications for one of the strongest car companies in the US?
A. Toyota has enjoyed tremendous growth in the United States. If you look back 16 years ago we were right at 6% of the market share for US automotive sales. Lexus did not exist and consumers were just beginning to understand the value of the quality in our vehicles. Today, the Toyota Camry has been America's best selling passenger car 4 out of the past 5 years; Lexus is the number one Luxury Car Make in the US; Scion has sprinted from the gates with phenomenal speed. There has been an enormous amount of infrastructure growth and development to meet the demands of our rapid expansion. Reuse, flexibility, scalability and speed to deployment are all critical factors in selection of our applications. Keeping pace without continuously having to reinvent the wheel is one of our strongest challenges.
Q. How did DataDirect's Connect for ODBC help meet those challenges?
A.Toyota had selected DataDirect in early 2002 as the best solution for us to extract data from our Oracle and DB2 stores. We were thrilled when Hyperion bundled their Version 8 Performance Suite software with DataDirect. This allowed us to consolidate all of our drivers into a standardized solution. This has eliminated the risk from data access in our projects.
Q. Many large companies are a conglomeration of UNIX and Windows systems and multiple databases. What's the environment at Toyota?
A. About the only thing you won't see at Toyota right now is Linux. There is exploration into Linux but our current workhorses are HPUX and Solaris for Unix and of course a host of Windows environments. Server consolidation is an objective that everyone is working hard to support. We need to get our environments out of the quadruple digits (1000 +) down to triple digits and possibly even lower. Standardization of tools supports this effort.
Q. How does this figure into technology adoption at Toyota?
A. We have had companies tell us that they can't honor the warranty of their applications if we run the applications concurrently with other applications on a server environment. It is likely that this will become a discriminating factor in tool selection in the future.
Q. What business requirements at Toyota drive custom application development?
A. There are many business needs throughout the company that are driving custom development. Almost all of them are supporting the continuous improvement processes that are consistent with the culture of Toyota. (Others are regulatory) Our goal is to do our jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible. When you can double your output without doubling your supporting staff then you are being more efficient. As an example, our Toyota Logistics Division has supported a 100% increase in the amount of vehicles they move from our plants/ports to our dealers with only a 3% growth in staff.
Q. What has been the biggest technical problem DataDirect has helped you solve?
A. Consistency in our delivery - taking the guesswork out of data retrieval.
Q. How has using DataDirect affected your own work / workload?
A. My group has been able to publish clear and concise instructions on data access configuration. By defining a repeatable process we take the dependencies on specialists out of the equation. When you know what you have and you know how it works and you know how to use it and you know how to maintain it the risks and cost to the projects are reduced.
Q. Why did you choose DataDirect?
A. We queried technologists for the best solution and DataDirect was the consistent answer.
Q. What would you tell someone looking to use DataDirect in their environment?
A. They can count on success!
