Mapping the Data Landscape 

If the enterprise information management function is to succeed where the data administration function did not, then it must address the issue of the enterprise data landscape. One of characteristics of ... data administration was that it lived and moved and had its being in the logical data layer. This is the realm of logical data models, and there is much value in logical data models. However, legacy data administrators saw the world as divided between logical and physical, and they were never going to go to the physical side. An attitude of “we design databases, but what the users put in them is their business” was the rule, and very often it was openly expressed. Inconveniently, data actually exists in physically implemented databases, and business users actually care about the stuff. These business users were never impressed by data administrators who had an attitude to physical data resembling that of pre-revolutionary French aristocrats to their uncouth peasantry. Those days are now   [More...] [Less...]