Designing the Enterprise IT Data Space

Reading A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander has given me some ideas about modeling data for enterprise IT systems. I’ll jump right in to my stream of conciousness. If the organization is viewed as a space in which different types of entities interact to accomplish the goals of the organization then we can define these entities in spacial terms such as Alexander lays out a town with its neighborhoods, shopping centers, buildings, roads and etc. This provides a structure for thinking about how the organization operates and what function IT applications perform within that organization.

 

Versioning Data in a Relational Model

If data never changed or needed to be updated our lives as software designers might be a little easier, we could just store the data once and be done with it. But data changes, it gets edited and deleted, and we designers cringe when we hear a user utter the words, “Can I undo that?” Its what Einstein did to Physics, he messed with the time dimension and everything came unraveled. Fortunately, for most of us we don’t have to work at the messy quantum level (yet). As it is with web software designers and data versioning, you might design twenty applications without having to worry much about it and then one day it hits you. “Can I undo?” Desktop application software designers have had to deal with the “undo” problem for many years, and now its time that web and IT software designers jump in. To make matters more complicated we have to figure out how to solve this problem for vast amounts of data typically stored in databases. Let’s call it Web 2.0 with the undo feature!