JCK - A Veteran-Owned Small Business		 EXCELLENCE IN DATA ARCHITECTURE

since 1989

America Support You		 4348 Pine Grove Ave
Fort Gratiot MI USA
48059-3732
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The Weakest Link in Business

Data Structure and User Reality

Business Events and Mathematical Modeling



What is User Focused Data Architecture? 		Unfortunately, a reflection this clear is more the exception than the rule. Typically there’s a “reality gap” – a difference between the user’s reality and the reality reflected by the data structure. How could this be? Consider this example:

This structure is attempting to capture the roles for a production, but misses badly. It can only accommodate two types of role: male and female lead. This doesn’t work with the user’s reality. Not only does it ignore other types of roles (such as producer), but it couldn’t handle a production with two male leads, or none.

This is an example of a structural reality gap. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how users working with the reality in the paragraph would be frustrated if someone tried to foist on them a reality based on this structure. But sadly, mistakes like this happen commonly.

How does a gap like this happen? There are several reasons, but here are a couple of the big ones:
  • The idea that a set of column-and-row tables could – and should – reflect the user’s reality is foreign to most technicians. They see a table structure as a convenient "byte bucket", and it’s structure of interest only to the programmers accessing the data.
  • This ignorance leads to the problem that in the systems design world, structuring data is seen a DBA work – germane to those managing the database structures, and well removed from the user’s environment. This almost guarantees ambiguity and miscommunication. From experience we know how challenging it can be when you’re working right with the users and deliberately attempting to build an accurate reflection of their reality. Having someone several steps removed attempting to build an accurate structure is expecting the near impossible.
 

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Since 1989, JCK has been devoted to teaching and implementing the principles of User-Focused Data Architecture. UFDA is based on the principle that the users are the data experts in any organization. Sound data architecture should focus on extracting the user's knowledge, clarifying ambiguous defintions, and building understandable data structures. These definitions and structures serve as the basis for system development. The first and most well known UFDA technique is Extended Relational Analysis ™ (ERA), which has been proven for decades. More recent techniques include Business Event Analysis & Modeling ™ (BEAM), which is useful for both Transactional Systems (BEAM TSS) and Decision Support Systems (BEAM DSS).