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An overview of a concept for getting your IT house in order.
"You must first plant the seeds in order to harvest the crop. "
-BRYCE'S LAW
The challenge facing systems development since the MIS movement of the 1960s has been to share and reuse information resources on an enterprise-wide basis. There are substantial benefits for doing so:
* The elimination of redundant work effort in systems design and programming, thereby accelerating delivery
* Simplified maintenance and enhancements of systems by controlling the whereabouts of information resources, plus how they relate and affect other components
* Integration of systems and software that eliminates data redundancy, and the production of inconsistent information
If companies had controlled information resources properly, the crossover to Y2K would have been a nonevent. Instead, billions of dollars were spent in preparation for the switch.
The concept of Information Resource Management (IRM) is quite simple: to inventory and control all of the resources needed to satisfy the information needs of an enterprise. This includes data components (data elements, records, files, databases, etc.), system components (systems, business processes, procedures, programs, etc.), and business components (functions, jobs, human and machine resources, skills, objectives, and projects).
To implement IRM, technology was introduced over the years, starting with the data dictionaries of the 1970s, which evolved into more robust products referred to as "Repositories" that included a manifest of all information resources...