First Principles: Visibility, Definition and Ownership

To be effective and sustainable any approach to managing data and managing change in business systems must be founded on the visibility, definition and ownership of data across all business activities, where…

VISIBILITY – i.e. the ability to look across all business activities from any individual perspective...

...should permit an enterprise-wide search for every occurrence of a chosen logical or physical data element or domain value. And given that all business references and descriptions are subjective (so that the same concept may be referred to or described differently by different business parties), VISIBILITY should also facilitate the translation of subjective terms - e.g. entity & attribute names, activity descriptions - from one business area to another.

DEFINITION – i.e. a set of logical, objective and meaningful descriptions for all data entities, attributes and domain values involved in all business activities...

...should reveal the commonality or disparity between different business activities with regard to a consistent logical context, given that...

(1) With sufficient analysis of business usage descriptions, physical data structures, example values etc. it is possible to ascertain where two or more physical data elements or domain values are logically equivalent – i.e. have the same logical definition, and...

(2) Within business systems any business activity can only be defined, absolutely and unambiguously, by its data dependencies – i.e. the data elements which are created, read, updated or deleted by that activity.

OWNERSHIP – i.e. the assigning of responsibility to nominated business parties for the pro-active management of all business activities and data assets...

…should ensure that regular data profiling of all relevant data sources is carried out at appropriate frequencies, and that everyone likely to be affected by any change can be easily identified.