So the data architect changes the relationship from mandatory to optional. Information was lost because the specific business rules that dictate an employee s relationship to his role were not captured. This could result in an improperly designed application. The DAMA Symposium conference offers many opportunities to ponder the role of data and business rules in your organization. The Antiques Road Show as an analogy.
People bring their possessions to the show without any real knowledge of what they actually have.
An expert examines the objects and learns as much as possible about its history from the owner. Data needs to be treated the same way. Not all data is valuable, but some is worth a fortune and knowing this is essential to preserving that value. Back to the Antiques Road Show analogy again, the information captured during the conversation between the owner and the expert is the meta data. Anne Marie Smith described the objective of Information Resource Management as planning, documenting, managing and controlling the information resources of an organization.