Information Architecture Principle
For any complex endeavor, there is value in beginning with a common principle to drive designs, procedures, and decisions. A credible principle is understandable, robust, complete, consistent, and stable. When an overarching principle is agreed upon, conflicting opinions can be objectively measured and standards can be decided upon that support the principle.
The following principle encompasses the three main areas of information management; database design and development, enterprise data center management, and business intelligence analysis;
Information Architecture Principle:
Information is an organizational asset, and, according to its value and scope, must be organized, inventoried, secured, and made readily available in a usable format for daily operations and analysis by individuals, groups, and processes, both today and in the future.
Unpacking this principle reveals several practical implications. First, there should be a known inventory of information including its location, source, sensitivity, present and future value, and current owner. While most organizational information is stored in IT databases, uninventoried critical data is often found in desktop databases and spreadsheets scattered throughout the organization.
Just as the value of physical assets vary from asset to asset and over time, the value of information is also variable and so must be assessed. The value of the information may be high for an individual or department, but less valuable to the organization as a whole. Information that is critical today might be meaningless in a month, or the information that may seem insignificant individually, might become critical for organizational planning once aggregated.
If the data is to be made easily available in the future, current designs must be de-coupled to avoid locking the data in a rigid, but brittle, database.
Based on the Information Architecture Principle, every data store can be designed or evaluated by seven interdependent data store objectives; simplicity, usability, data integrity, performance, availability, extensibility, security.
The SQL Server 2005 Advanced Design and Optimization workshop includes a detailed study of this principle and how to appply it to your designs.