A rant about data and information architecture

Data is unquestionably the life blood of any organisation, but it is paid less attention than it deserves. It is more important than technology and software application but in most organisations it doesn’t command the same level of respect. If you don’t architect your data the consequences are widely understood. Examples of these consequences are data quality problems, customer relations issues, no single view of the truth, no single view of customer, misinformed business decision. There is a vast amount of literature on this topic but little action hence the continuous discussions on forums, blogs and in articles and books on all these issues.

Businesses soak up data into various databases and warehouses and produce information as the output. You can think of information as data on a mission. We mentioned above that data architecture is not taken as seriously as it should. This results in data not have adequate architectural rigour. With this state of affairs what chance do we have for information architecture.

I've recently launched a Data Architecture Training Course to help companies address these challenges.