Data Standardization in Changing Enterprises

During the last decades, the frequency of business changes and the time in which these changes have to be incorporated have increased and are still increasing. In this context, the standardization of major application data and of the communication data between applications becomes an important IT issue. However, since people from the business do not speak in a common language, it is more than a pure IT topic. Following the paradigm of today’s software development, problems arise when building IT solutions based on business processes. Different people from the business using the same process may have a different understanding of the information entities with which they deal. People who are responsible for the IT solutions try to put all these issues into one product, often failing because of a lack of understanding and transparency. Additionally, important architecture concepts like service-oriented architecture are not able to gain success without data standardization. The Siemens Plc. has developed a concept for data standardization that considers the business changes. The basic idea is to take business-level specifications and use business process documentation as a starting point to ensure that a common business language is available before the application development starts. Since the Siemens Plc. is a process-driven enterprise, every business and IT change depends on business processes. Thus, to tie the data standardization to the same mechanisms seems promising.