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Adaptive at the 19th Annual DAMA
International Symposium & 11th Annual WILSHIRE Meta-Data Conference,
Boston, MA (March 4-8, 2007)
With 18 different Conference Tracks to choose from, there was plenty
for everybody at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. When there were clashing
sessions of interest, it was great to know that both the presentation
slides and the audio from each session would be available on-line
to all delegates after the conference was over. What struck us was
the many common threads across sessions which, on the surface, seemed
to have very little in common with each other. As well as learning
internal detail on a topic, we also learned more on how it fits into
the "bigger picture".
Outside the formal sessions, the conference was also a great place
to 'network'; making new contacts as well as meeting up with customers,
partners, analysts, consultants and other old friends from across
the "meta" world, including Charlie Betz, who considers
Adaptive "to be the finest metadata repository out there"
and whose summary of the conference can be found here.
The exhibition hall was buzzing with interest, and we were kept busy
giving multiple parallel demonstrations throughout the official opening
hours (and sometimes beyond). However, we did face severe competition
from one exhibitor - their recruitment of "Curley" Neal,
formerly of the Harlem Globetrotters, to sign photographs and mini-basketballs,
was the biggest crowd-puller in the hall. Didn't he look in fantastic
shape for a 65 year old?
Adaptive's CTO, Pete Rivett, had a speaking slot on the Wednesday
morning. He was publicising the Object Management Group's IMM ("Information
Management Metamodel"), which is under development and broadens,
updates and renames the existing mature and stable CWM® standard,
aligning it also with several other OMG® standards. A key theme
was to integrate Information Management with other areas of modeling
and enterprise architecture including UML, Ontologies, Service Oriented
Architecture, Business Processes, Business Vocabulary. Pete was greatly
encouraged by the level of interest, including offers of additional
help in the standard adoption process, and led a Special Interest
Group first thing the next day (the fact that people showed up at
7:30 a.m. shows that they really were interested!). For more information,
including Pete's presentation, please visit the IMM Wiki at http://www.omgwiki.org/imm/doku.php
There were some interesting and recurring conference themes concerning
metadata repositories, all of which Adaptive endorses. For example:
1. The repository is no longer just an IT department's internal tool,
but must serve the business community directly, with a correspondingly
friendly and collaborative UI accessible from any device on the network.
At least 2 sessions were devoted to "Web 2.0" technologies
for this - which Adaptive has been working with for a while.
2. The repository must be easily extensible and tailorable to increase
its scope incrementally, absorbing and displaying metadata from a
growing number of sources.
3. As a specific example of the above, SOA is the latest in a line
of three-letter-acronyms (along with ETL, EAI, EII, etc) responsible
for disseminating our data throughout the organization. Unless we
keep up, our grip on who is using what data, where and why, is going
to slip away from us. SOA is also important because of its inherent
central position between the organization's data, its business processes,
and its application architecture. The metadata repository is becoming
a true Enterprise Architecture solution. Though the DAMA community
should be doing more to spread the message - for example at SOA conferences
- to avoid itself becoming silo'd. Adaptive is attempting to spread
the message through its involvement in the OMG SOA Special Interest
Group (which it co-founded) and through ensuring the different modeling
standards are integrateable. In fact it was clear to us at the conference
that the DAMA community leads the industry in a number of different
areas including governance, audit, quality, modeling and enterprise
architecture.
4. Standards, an Adaptive favourite, continue to be popular with the
metadata consultants - the ones who have experience of implementing
metadata strategies in multiple organizations. Whether you decide
to build or buy a repository, they have seen the rewards that adherence
to standards can bring to metadata management programs.
5. Much as the Datawarehouse holds historical data in order to support
trend analyses, so versions of the metadata concerning population
of the Datawarehouse must be retained too. Details of the data sources
and the ETL rules applied in populating the Datawarehouse, will inevitably
change over time. Year on year comparisons in the Datawarehouse can
only be valid if there is an appreciation of how the collection of
the data may have changed over time.
Adaptive will certainly be back at the 20th Annual DAMA International
Symposium & 12th Annual WILSHIRE Meta-Data Conference next year.
Whether you made it to Boston this year or not, we hope your appetite
has been whetted and that we will see you in San Diego, March 16-20,
in 2008. http://www.wilshireconferences.com/MD2008/index.html
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