Sunday, June 24, 2007

Unlocking value

Data Management is a bit of a boring subject to many, But when done well it can lead to massive benefits that you cannot even imagine at the start. An example is the success of the Internet. At the end of the day it is actually a data management success. The W3C has been very successful in setting and enforcing a few standards on how to address machines in a network (IP adresses), how to exchange information (the IP Protocol), how to name domains (DNS) - and replicate this across the network, and how to publish and link information within these domains (HTML). Everything else after that is now history. Nobody could have imagined the growth of the Internet in the last decade and half.

What it proofs is that we need to agree on certain basics and at the same time need to give the freedom to everything else. Within data management we see people spending enormous amounts of time in trying to come up with the perfect data model, or have endless discussions about how to define a unique identifier, but to me these discussions are usually a bit academic. What really counts is that a decision is taken; a standard has been agreed. It can be a standard which is not perfect (like the Qwerty keyboard); but if it works it will have benefits beyond what it was designed for.

Think about what would be possible with the wide adoption of XML to the same level as the adoption of HTML? Unfortunately agreement on formatting is much easier than agreement on content. Still I can see enormous steps being taken in the Web2.0 world where information from different sources is being mashed together from lots of different sources (e.g. Google News). Imagine what you would be able to do if information within a company could be mashed together automatically, because the information is easily recognised? So it is still worth the effort to spend some time on meta data, because it may lead to some unplanned by-effects beyond imagination!

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