“What a team!” Or should that be… “What team?” - Section 5 of 14: THE DATA ARCHITECTURE CONSTRUCTION PROJECT (free excerpts)

This is the fifth part of the chapter titled “The Data Architecture Construction Project”, from the book “The Data Garden And Other Data Allegories”.

______________________________

“What a team!” Or should that be… “What team?”

A meeting’s been organised with the leaders of each of your teams. Helpfully, representatives from some of the other architecture firms and building companies have also agreed to join.

As you walk into the meeting room, you can feel the tension amongst the people gathered there. You smile broadly and say hello, walking in with as much confidence as you can muster to take a seat at the top of the long table that fills most of the room. The windows are open, but there’s no breeze and the room’s hot and stuffy. All of the seats are occupied, people crammed into the narrow gaps between the table and the walls, and there are a few people stood up at the back of the room. You can see one person leaning on the limp remains of a broken fan, wafting himself with a notebook in a vain attempt to cool down.

You introduce yourself and offer your vision of positive collaboration and collective success. Rather than spending lots of time talking about yourself, you make it clear that you want to hear from people in the room and invite them to speak in turn. You say that you’re keen to encourage open discussion and want to hear about people’s concerns and challenges, so you can do something about them.


Abstraction Utopia

The team to go first is sat closest to you and is clearly keen to impress. It’s the Strategic Architecture team. The team’s leader eagerly introduces himself and his three team members, who are surrounded by stacks of printouts and as they start talking, are pointing at some very pretty-looking presentation slides displayed on their sleek tablet computers.

This is the kind of Architecture team that your Head Builder had been talking about. Lots of great ideas and pretty pictures, but the diagrams and strategies that they describe to you have very little connection to reality.

The vision that they paint envisages the use of the most advanced technologies to deliver transformational value to all who use them. Everything will fit into the neat concepts that the boxes on their slides represent, and data will flow seamlessly and without error from one end of the page to the other. It’s inspiring and expansive. It’s compelling thought leadership and you can see the excitement and hope in their eyes.

It’s also totally unrealistic.

They clearly understand technology and have definitely done their research into the newest and best tools available. You can also tell that this is a team of technology experts who really know the state of the art and could have some great, out-of-the-box ideas to solve problems, if they were directed at the right problems to solve and with the right constraints. Unfortunately, they’ve spent too long gazing at the stars and thinking into the future, without being grounded in the current challenges so that they could develop solutions to immediate problems and work out what needs to happen in the “here and now”, to be able to get to the “there and then”.

To be fair to them, they do finish off their presentation by skimming through fifty pages of “transition state” plans, with beautiful illustrations, showing how their vision could be realised by building the new structures on top of the remnants of the legacy architectures across Data Insights Town. The trouble is, although you can appreciate the theory, you also know from what you saw on your drive to the office, that the theory isn’t based on a real understanding of the existing architectures or what it’s going to take to evolve the town in a realistic and cost-effective way.

You thank the team encouragingly and give the nod for the next team to talk.

______________________________


I hope you’ve enjoyed this excerpt. 

If you are interested in reading more, please do check the book out on Amazon:

  • The Data Garden on Amazon.CO.UK
  • The Data Garden on Amazon.COM

    • Thanks for reading!


    #data #datamanagement #datagovernance #dataquality #dataarchitecture #metadata #dataliteracy #allegories #metaphors #analogies #stories #storytelling 


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