Data Interoperability presentation by Michael Gorman

I had the chance to meet Michael Gorman of Whitemarsh yesterday at the DAMA-NCR quarterly meeting. Michael is definately a spirited fellow and his discussion revolved around his book titled "Data Interoperability Community of Interest handbook" (as well as the Whitemarsh software package named "Metabase").

Michael had some pretty interesting things to say but he was definately trying way too hard to "sell" both his book and his companies software. The software seems interesting, basically it's a metadata repository of sorts but will allow you to forward engineer new database ddl based off rules generated from existing reverse engineered database ddl (as well as the topics of Organizations, Missions and functions). Like I said, pretty interesting but you might need a bit more then two hours to digest all the info. I'm a little concerned about the overall product because if he couldn't get a room full of data architect type folks really interested in the product I'm not sure who he's going to get interested.

Some of the better things (for me) he talked about:
- He believes that Data Driven application design produces about 4x less physical tables then Process Driven application design (YES).
- He talked a little bit about some of his experience implementing what he called a "skeleton replacement" or ERP implementation for a state school system. Interestingly enough he believed that the failures he saw were mostly due to the human "process" not changing together with the application/IT processes.
- He kept going down the path of discussing large system failures and he strongly believes that most large system failures were due to post impementation issues and not issues that could have been resolved up front.
- He created a data/knowledge worker framework (like the Enterprise Arch/Zackman framework) which was interesting. He talked a bit about a Data Maturity Model as well.

Overall he seemed to be a really sharp guy and he had really great stories. Too bad he had his salesman hat on, the conversation would have been alot more enjoyable.

Until next time...Rich

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