FastChangeCoTM is a company to illustrate the problems, challenges and opportunities of my customers without naming them concretely.
Since I developed FastChangeCoTM in 2015 from a spontaneous idea, I have been successfully applying FastChangeCoTM in my presentations, workshops, trainings, coaching and projects.
(The original blog post FastChangeCo - A Fictitious Company from 2017 can be read again here.)
FastChangeCo
FastChangeCo is a fictitious company founded at the end of the 19th century. To be precise: In 1888.
Today, we would say it was a start-up. The founder, Albert Fast, had great ideas for building conveyor belts and assembly lines, among other things, which were then used by Ford and others in the early 20th century.
In the decades that followed, FastChangeCo grew into a conglomerate and became a global player in the 1990s.
FastChangeCo now has tens of thousands of employees, thousands of products in various industries, and billions in sales.
Business Intelligence
In the 1990s, FastChangeCo launched its first business intelligence initiative to better understand its business and optimize value creation in manufacturing. In the years that followed, it built its third data warehouse, which has now also reached the end of its lifecycle.
Why? FastChangeCo was struggling with ever-faster changing business requirements and more and more changes in operational systems, and kept trying to enhance the data warehouse with cutting-edge technologies to handle all these changes.
However, in the end, the ambitious goals could not be achieved to meet all requirements. The data warehouse increasingly became a bottleneck. The requirements of the business departments were changing faster and faster, business processes were changing more and more frequently, and new operating systems were being developed with increasing agility. In other words, the applications and requirements downstream of the data warehouse were changing just as quickly as the upstream operational systems.
All these challenges were too much for the existing business intelligence structures at FastChangeCo. The management recognized this unsatisfactory situation for all stakeholders like controllers, business intelligence developers, middle management and many more and decided to build a contemporary data solution.
Michael Mueller, as the new Head of Data Management, is considered to have the best ideas to build a better or the best data solution for FastChangeCo. Together with his team at the Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCE), his objective is for this data solution to be the last one FastChangeCo needs for the time being.
Geographical 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
- Michael Mueller - Head of Data Management
- 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
- Diego Pasión - Coach
University of Temptation City
This is the local university in Temptation City. It is often referred to as ‘Albert Fast’ University because it was named after FastChangeCo's founder, Albert Fast, who made a significant contribution to the local economy. His early financial support enabled the construction of various parts of the university, and many students work or worked for the company.
Outlook
This then, is FastChangeCo, the fictional company I use in my blogposts, talks, workshops, trainings, coaching and projects: a company on its way to creating a contemporary, flexible, lean and easily extensible data solution that is up to the challenges of the real world of today and tomorrow.
Stay tuned for more to come.
Until then
Your Dirk
[1] Spoken: no-one-da-ta