Skip to main content

Data-centric architecture, for better services

John Schmidt of Informatica argues that the digital transformation of an organisation is better supported by focussing on the organisation's data, rather than its IT applications.  An application-centric approach structures an organisation's IT by the applications, each of which has a business owner and defined functions.  This works as long as these functions remain separate.  But when more processes are moved online, when the processes become more complex and involve multiple business areas, the emphasis needs to shift away from the individual applications, to the processes and the data that they use.

I agree with this point of view.  Software development (of individual programs) moved to this approach a long time ago, primarily with the introduction of object-oriented programming. Basing the structure of programs around the data elements, rather than the processes, made it easier to change the processes.  A data-centric approach to architecture is taking the same approach on a larger scale.

The difficulty can be in explaining the advantages to the business areas.  In software development, the choice of program structure is an internal matter for the programmers to decide.  In architecture, the decision is more visible, because it is often the business areas who pay for, and choose, the IT applications that we deploy.  So we need materials to explain why this is a good idea, using non-technical language (or "speaking human", as a colleague put it).  I don't have an easy answer for this, but I'm working on it.

My thanks to Ian Anderson for alerting me to John's post, via the UCISA EA mailing list.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project Leadership

When I look back over recent projects that I've been involved in, it seems that one key to making a project successful is having someone on the team who really drives it forward: someone who is invested in the project as a whole and not just their own part in it. We (by which I mean the University's Applications division) have a well-defined project process, with defined roles, required milestones, deployment standards, and so forth.    All these are useful, but if the team doesn't have a leader, it seems a project can lose its way, perhaps not responding to changing circumstances, getting stuck on a technical problem, or not securing a needed resource in time to meet some external constraint. The leader can be any member of the team - it could be a developer, a project manager, or the sponsor, or someone in another role.  A team can include several people who are this committed to the project; it doesn't have to be a single person.   As an example, one of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Business Model Canvas

A Business Model Canvas is a tool for mapping the core functions and capabilities of an organisation.  Compared to the Core Diagrams that I described in an earlier post , the business model canvas attempts to present more aspects of the business, starting with the value proposition – a statement of what the organisation offers to its users (in the business world, to its customers).  It shows the activities and resources, as Core Diagrams do, but also shows user relationships & channels, and also benefits and costs.  I’m not aware of any universities that have used this tool but you can find examples from elsewhere on the web. We are considering business model canvases as a tool for mapping the strategic capabilities of units at the University of Edinburgh.  Phil Taylor, our EA contractor, sketched an outline of what a business model canvas might begin to look like for HR: This is only intended to be suggestive: the real canvas would need to result from in-de...
2 comments
Read more

"That's not Grid!" - A cautionary tale

I don't usually attempt humour here, but see if you like this... Once upon a time, in the far-off world of Computerland, a great guru arose and declared a vision. "I see a future when all computers will be linked together and people will run their programs without knowing which computers are running them. People do not need to know where their jobs run; they just need the results. I call this Grid Computing!" The people of Computerland were excited by the guru's vision. They went away and worked to make it happen. When they were ready, they returned to the guru and said: "Oh great guru! We have implemented your vision. We can run our programs on whichever processor is free at the time, making sure that all programs can run and making best use of all our processors. No longer does one computer sit idle while another one is overloaded. Your vision is a great success!" "No, no, no!", said the guru, "That's not Grid!" The guru exp...
3 comments
Read more