What's the "C" in CDM Mean?

 

What's a CDM...Conceptual or Common. I stumbled upon this blog post  and found it to be interesting. Read and comment!

Leveraging Information and Intelligence

David Linthicum

Build a Common Data Model. I dare you.

By David Linthicum on February 20, 2009 5:04 PM 2 0 Vote 0 Votes

Common Data Models, or CDMs, is something I've been pushing for years since the EAI days. These days I'm seeing some good thinking around this problem and some good technology behind it as well. The data is the single most important component of enterprise architecture and data integration, and you need to think carefully about how the data is managed in terms of data integration and business intelligence. In essence, you need a common understanding that spans the enterprise.

Truth-be-told most enterprises have no clue what their core metadata is enterprise wide, no less any sort of CDM for the enterprise. This is a good test for those ready to be successful with data integration, and those that still need to do a great deal of work. Unfortunately, most need to do the work.

How do you build a CDM? It's really an enterprise metadata model, that's fully normalized and compartmentalized, so that there is a complete single, functional, and well defined schema that spans the enterprise. Moreover, all security, logic, rules, and other important information is defined in the CDM. Creating a CDM is just a matter of understanding the existing data, including semantics, structure, integrity, rules, logic, and physical location, and then working through the logical and physical design of the CDM, including normalization, and physical to virtual database abstraction.

While this may sound like a lot of work, I've done it in weeks, as long as the information is there someplace. In some instances you have to do some reverse engineering, and that's really not a problem these days either.

If you don't have a CDM, you should create one. I dare you.