Wednesday, April 05, 2006
The "disparate data problem": myth busters #1
I recently received an interesting email trail on multiple government officials discussing how they are working on ... with varying degrees of success "the disparate data problem". Unfortunately, most engineers know this is not a technical problem... it is a cost/benefit problem. It is easy to expose data ... a simple combination of web services and a registry solves the problem. The real issues are what to expose, what to tag and who to burden with the responsibility. That's a management issue.
So, we need to keep the proper perspective... Disparate Data is not a problem... Understanding your business and mission well enough and how data supports that mission is the real issue. Here is an analogy I find useful: Data is to an organization's mission like combat support is to combat units. Data done right is a combat multiplier... but there are two things there that hold it back ... first, focusing too much on the combat and not on what supports the combat and secondly not having a clean methodology to see the line of sight between mission and data.
It is that line of sight process that the FEA DRM begins and which I am continuing to work on ...
So, we need to keep the proper perspective... Disparate Data is not a problem... Understanding your business and mission well enough and how data supports that mission is the real issue. Here is an analogy I find useful: Data is to an organization's mission like combat support is to combat units. Data done right is a combat multiplier... but there are two things there that hold it back ... first, focusing too much on the combat and not on what supports the combat and secondly not having a clean methodology to see the line of sight between mission and data.
It is that line of sight process that the FEA DRM begins and which I am continuing to work on ...
