Universal Acceptance, Part 2

The advantages of using a universal model

Many people purchase a universal model because they think they will be able to skip the business analysis phase of a project. After all, the requirements are all there inside the model, right? Sorry, but nothing is further from the truth. You can use the model to help you analyze your business, but it can't replace that analysis.

Knowing that you have to inventory your business concepts and map them into the universal model might dampen your enthusiasm. If using a model increases the time it takes to understand your business, what possible benefit can it provide?

In part 1 of this column ("Universal Acceptance," Sept. 18, 2001), I refuted the notion that universal models are too abstract to relate to your unique business. This time, I tell you why these models are worth the time and effort you put into using them.

Enterprise Integration

If your organization has several autonomous product lines or markets, chances are they have evolved independently of one another. Each has become a community with its own culture, processes, business rules, and vocabulary. Should your organization want to examine itself from an enterprisewide perspective, as occurs with a CRM initiative, these fiefdoms produce smoke screens that inhibit its progress. Likewise, if your company has embarked on a strategy of growth through mergers and acquisitions, the enterprise view becomes even fuzzier with each new community absorbed into the enterprise.

The fundamental business concepts of a universal model provide a framework for integrating the disparate terms in your various lines of business. The universal model's concepts are a catalog of neutral terms. By mapping your terms into these business concepts, you can see how your various organizations overlap. Yet, you aren't requiring any line of business to change its words. You gain an enterprisewide view while avoiding the resistance that often meets the parent organization that tries to force its communities to change their vocabularies.

Multiple Benefits

A universal model bestows additional benefits when used as the basis of your enterprise model and the design of your enterprise data store. For one, the mapping process becomes the cornerstone of your data stewardship program. As a result, your enterprise integration effort provides stewardship at the business-concept level.

You mine your application portfolio to discover how the model's concepts manifest in each business line's applications and databases. The mappings between an application's data and the enterprise data store become the requirements for transforming each business line's data into the format specified through the universal model. As application data migrates to the enterprise data store, it becomes the enterprise's single source of authoritative and integrated data. Over time, you get another benefit: An enterprisewide data hub emerges as you rearchitect applications to service their data requirements through the enterprise data store.

A universal data model is adaptable to the needs of different industries and organizations through its entity typing facility. Every primary entity in the model has a corresponding Type entity that records the mapping between your organization's terms and the fundamental business concepts. The typing facility provides the flexibility you need to rapidly assimilate the next business line's concepts into the enterprise data store. Likewise, the data necessary to support new products and markets can be readily incorporated into the enterprise data store. Changes to the enterprise model and enterprise data store are required only when an entirely new business concept arises.

A greater level of flexibility is achievable when your universal model is also dynamic. The typing facility handles only business concepts that are represented as primary entities in the universal data model. A dynamic data model expands this facility to support additional business rule types, such as those that govern the behavior of entity relationships, allowed values for attributes, the expressions that define attribute derivation rules, or the qualification rules for business states and the allowed transitions between business states. Some models even provide the ability to dynamically define new attributes to the enterprise data store.

An enterprise data store application validates its data against the business rules defined through the dynamic model's business rule facilities. New business rules can be added and existing ones modified because the code to support these types of business rules are held as data in database tables, no longer hard-coded using relational database facilities.

The Real Payoff

A certain level of flexibility comes from using universal and dynamic models as the basis of database design. But the real payoff comes when applications are built to exploit the fundamental business concepts and business rule facilities. When a database is designed to use the facilities of a dynamic, universal data model, the database environment can rapidly accommodate changing business rules, often without requiring any structural database changes. But if applications are still built using traditional approaches where the support of most business rules, including data validation rules, is embedded within application code, the impact of changing business rules on the application portfolio can still be massive. Why build a database that can accommodate changes in five minutes, if you still need three months to reflect those changes in application code?

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If your enterprise's objective is to cut the time to market for new products and pricing plans, for entering new markets, or for assimilating other organizations that it acquires, you can't afford to keep building applications the old way. Applications built around the universal model's fundamental business concepts and the business rule facilities that accompany dynamic models are nimbler. They know how to handle the business rules as they are modified within the database. With the demand to drive the enterprise view of a customer to every enterprise customer touchpoint, you can't afford to continue building applications using design approaches that resist change.

Expect Resistance

Business executives and decision makers are very accepting toward universal data models. They have no problem seeing their business within the structures of one of these models, which is why I've seen so many business subject matter experts embrace these models, stating, "Finally someone has given me something that supports my business." I wish I could say the same about those organizations' IT groups.

I've encountered resistance across the board from within IT - from data modelers who are used to developing models from scratch, to DBAs whose gut reaction is that these types of database can't possibly perform in their environment, to application architects and developers who honestly believe that data designs should be optimized to meet their application's specific requirements. They all represent stumbling blocks on the road to successfully incorporating a universal model into your technical environment. Many of the issues IT raises are legitimate. As the champion of the model, you must anticipate these concerns and be prepared to address them.

If one of the primary uses of data models within your organization is to teach your IT staff your company's business, you don't want to buy a universal model. However, if the objective is to position your enterprise to better accommodate change, a universal model has a place in your enterprise's strategy. It's worth the fight. Prepare to do battle.

Terry Moriarty [terry@inastrol.com] is president of Inastrol, a Southern Calif.-based information management consultancy that specializes in a business rules-based approach to customer relationship management and metadata management.