Quick aside. This is a group of people celebrating that according to AI are “mixed ethnicity and age”. WTF?
Rant #1 Over … On To A Rant About The Fundamental Failure of Application Design
Of all the posts on this blog this may be the one that matters to me the most.
There is a good argument that the archiving we do as IT Garbagemen is a complete waste of time and money. Reason being: we are carefully assessing and cataloging applications, designing reports and queries, demonstrating completeness of data … to satisfy questions that will probably never be asked. We’re just managing risk – preparing to address legal, regulatory and compliance questions. It is critical to do but we’ve got to reimagine the whole process.
What if we understood data structures at the implementation of the application? What if we understood what data the application creates and what it consumes? The way of accessing the data? The reporting requirements?
What if instead of spending the time and effort at the end of the application lifecycle when almost no-one will ever care we did this at the start of the application lifecycle and presented the data to the business groups needing it?
Put another way … what if we spent the time and money implementing good data governance instead of paying to clean up the garbage?!?
The Paradigm Change
A good data governance strategy will require that at a company level there are:
- A data governance standard
- A data governance/master data management organization to sustain the strategy
- Defined data domains
- Application governance process
- Metadata governance process
- Corporate data store
Product Owners implement an application data governance plan that:
- Defines the methodology that will be used to present and consume data
- Identifies all of the data elements in the application that exist in the data domains
- Identifies whether those elements are consumed, created or supplemented, and whether the application is the system of record for the element
That’s All Folks …
Seriously, that’s it. Good data governance requires that we spend our skills, time and effort making data available to the corporation for the common good. Lousy data governance keeps IT Garbagemen employed. If you don’t agree that’s your right, but I’ve wasted too much of my career sacrificing time and effort to lousy data governance and am not interested in debating it.
