Cartography … the art of mapmaking provides some great analogies for how we use business information. Like a good map, you rely on business information for a sense of direction.

• to gain perspective about where you are now
• to plan the best route to where you want to be, and
• to anticipate the challenges you may encounter along the way.

Think about maps … they have gone from hand-drawn parchments to computer rendered images on personal navigation devices … triangulating GPS coordinates from satellites miles above us and directing us to within a few meters of a destination.

Now think about how your key business information is organized. Does it seem like parchment these days?

In a few short years technology has allowed us to increase the precision and volume of data that we collect and retain by several orders of magnitude.

Not many years ago, you could have as much data as you wanted, as long as it fit on an 80-column card. Now you slip several gigabytes into a shirt pocket on a USB jump drive.

The question isn’t whether your IT team has stayed abreast of the technology curve … the question is whether the map you rely on to direct your business kept pace!

What you measure, how you measure it, and how you deliver it have all changed radically.

Whether you can use this glut of data effectively depends largely on your business metadata design … think of it as the “roads on your roadmap”.

Data cartography draws a business metadata roadmap that helps users leverage your investment to collect, analyze, and retain business information.

From a business user’s perspective, getting “all that stuff” into a database is the easy part.

Getting it back out in ways that are relevant and useful for business users is the challenge … and with business repositories measured in multiple terabytes (10¹²) or larger, the resulting challenge becomes daunting.

Your data is organized at two levels –

• Physically into computer files and database tables
• Conceptually into the classes and categories that you use for processing and analysis

Your IT professionals can recommend software and design databases that efficiently deal with the physical organization of your information.

den Karte helps clients build the business information map. This means finding effective ways to classify and categorize data along the analytical paths that are most useful to decision-makers.

Maps have evolved from hand-drawn parchments to computer renderings of satellite images ... how has your map evolved?