March 7, 2007

1:15 PM - 2:15 PM

Level: Introductory/All Levels

After 35+ years there have been few sustained successes for enterprise metadata repositories. Why is this?

The need for data dictionaries—currently known as metadata repository—was recognized at the dawn of the database age in the early 1970s.

The purpose then as now was to keep track of all the artifacts—data elements, screen layouts, schemas, subroutines, programs, files, and systems—PLUS the relationships between said artifacts.

The need for this bill-of-materials-impact-analysis database engine is even greater today now that applications are spread across many hardware platforms, operating systems, and hundreds of software languages.

A well populated repository serves as a reliable source of corporate systems knowledge and memory.

Without a populated and accessible metadata repository no one can reliably answer senior management 's question: "How many places in our systems are we exposed to privacy breaches where we use unencrypted social security number?"

This presentation will be an overview of why metadata repositories consistently failed in the past, what are the lessons to be learned from those failures, and what you can do to avoid repeating the same costly mistakes.

Having experienced the collapse of the first generation enterprise repositories in the early 1990s, Mr. Eddy brings broad market experience to the challenges of managing sprawling, heterogeneous enterprise application portfolios, and one of their peskier components—data elements. In June 1995 he coined the term "Y2K."