Smart Data: Enterprise Performance Optimization Strategy

4.3 FIVE YEARS FROM NOW

There is a struggle underway at present between technology vendors that want to control the customer environment with proprietary solutions and customers that need and want independence via interoperable and open systems. Because of the depressed global economy and consolidation among leading technology vendors and systems integrators over the past 10 years, this leaves enterprises with fewer alternatives. Perhaps a resurging economy will turn this circumstance around with enterprises leading the way with greater control over their destinies.

Globalization forces enterprises to accommodate greater diversity in languages, rules, and cultures such that technologies like semantic engineering become most relevant. Needed are better tools for data engineering—better metadata management, better mapping, better data exchange utilities.

In the simplest terms, we have discussed that having a model of all of the major processes in the enterprise is essential to precise management. Having an enterprise data model depicting all of the data that fuels processes and that are outputs from processes is essential to precise management. Being able to associate specific data to specific processes is essential to precise enterprise performance management. Under-standing the impact of business rules on processes and data is essential to precise enterprise management.

We reviewed our progress with Dan Appleton and he suggested that we consider a paper written by Mark Fox and ...