FastChangeCo is a fictional company, but it faces many of the real-world challenges and opportunities that you may find familiar.
In our book, we follow FastChangeCo on its journey to implementing a data solution that stands the test of time. When designing and developing such solutions, there are often multiple ways to tackle the same problem, and strong opinions can emerge around these approaches.
Navigating these dynamics and finding workable solutions is central to the FastChangeCo story.
FastChangeCo
FastChangeCo was founded at the end of the 19th century, in 1888 to be precise.
In today's terms, it could be considered a disruptor. The founder, Albert Fast, had visionary ideas for building conveyor belts and assembly lines—concepts later adopted by Ford and others in the early 20th century.
Over the following decades, FastChangeCo grew into a global conglomerate, becoming a major player by the 1990s.
Today, FastChangeCo employs tens of thousands of people, offers thousands of products across various industries, and generates billions in revenue.
Business Intelligence
In the 1990s, FastChangeCo launched its first Business Intelligence (BI) initiative to better understand its business and optimize value creation in manufacturing.
Over time, a third Data Warehouse was built, which, like its predecessors, is now slowly reaching the end of its lifecycle.
In response to rapidly evolving business needs, FastChangeCo made several attempts to modernize the Data Warehouse with new technologies. However, despite these efforts, the ambitious goal of fully meeting all business needs through the Data Warehouse was never fully realized.
Despite these efforts, the Data Warehouse increasingly became a bottleneck. Business requirements evolved at a rapid pace, processes changed more frequently, and new operational systems were developed with greater agility. In short, the applications and requirements downstream of the Data Warehouse were changing just as quickly as the upstream systems.
These challenges began to overwhelm FastChangeCo's BI infrastructure. Recognizing the unsatisfactory situation for stakeholders—such as controllers, BI developers, and middle management—the leadership team decided to explore new approaches for delivering data solutions.
The first priority in is to transform the aging BI organization into a modern data competence center. This involves planning and implementing the data and reporting strategy, and advancing from the current reporting system to one with cutting-edge visualization capabilities.
After many interviews, Michael Mueller was selected as the ideal candidate to lead FastChangeCo’s transformation towards superior data management. As a result, he was appointed as the new Head of Data Management.
FastChangeCo's leadership is eager to embark on this journey, aiming to design a data solution that will be the last one they ever need.
Location
FastChangeCo was founded in the fictional country of N'Oonedaatan[1] and has its headquarters in Temptation City. Because of the many companies located here that work to a great extent or almost exclusively with data, the city is also nicknamed ‘Sin datos, no hay paraíso’.
Characters
The FastChangeCo world consists of some fictional characters with the different characteristics:
Sylvia Seven
CFO
Jeff Jones
Head of IT
Yerodin van Dusseldorp
Controller
Terence Tindle
BI architect
Xuefang Kaya
Junior Data Modeler
Amal Leyla Qasim
Data Modeler and BI specialist
Philomena Pavlovic
Application developer
Zalika Okoro
Student
[1] Spoken: no-one-da-ta