Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Role of Data Architect
Role of Data Architect
used as a baseline to create the data architects vision, mission, goals, CSFs, and
inhibitors. This, in turn, can be used to construct the architects roles and responsibilities.
If there is no baseline available for business process reengineering, then the data architect
should identify those key individuals, both inside and out of IT, with whom the architect
expects to interface. This list of identified individuals should represent the constituency
that the data architect should serve. Once the list is validated, the data architect should
facilitate a planning session with these players. The outputs of this session should be the
data architects roles and responsibilities along with the roles each of the attendees will
play. RFG suggests the facilitator use the development of a vision statement, a mission
statement, goals, critical success factors (CSFs), and inhibitors as a way to determine the
underlying roles and responsibilities.
Unfortunately, most reengineering efforts or planning sessions do not adequately address
the issue of knowledge management. The data architects purview are not just a subset of
those developed for the overall enterprise process statements or the set of views
expressed by the planning team. The new view must incorporate the architecting of data
needed for corporate knowledge management an area unfamiliar to most employees.
Knowledge management is the broad process of locating, organizing, transferring, and
using the information and expertise within an organization. According to the American
Productivity and Quality Center (at www.apqc.org on the World Wide Web), the four key
enablers supporting the overall knowledge management process are leadership, culture,
technology, and measurement. A data architect must therefore be able to envision the data
requirements of such future infrastructure needs.
IT knowledge is but one aspect of a data architects role. Since the data architect is the
end-users interface and translator of their business requirements to the IT community, the
architect must possess good interpersonal skills. A data architect must have the ability to
facilitate agreements and resolve conflicts amongst organizations. To do that successfully,
an architect must be able to interpret business needs into data requirements including
such attributes as naming standards, consistent data definitions, data aliases, associated
business rules, data sources, retention criteria, derivations, security restrictions,
accessibility, reusability, currency, frequency of update, linkages, and integration. (See
the chart for a sample outline of roles and responsibilities.)
One of the less obvious responsibilities of a data architect is the ability to differentiate
between valuable, usable information and useless data. People are quite able to theorize
on how data might be used someday or data they would like to have; but frequently that
data is not transferable into actionable information or knowledge that either makes the
company more productive or drives added revenue. It will be up to the data architect to
negotiate with the appropriate players to ensure only the right data is captured,
manipulated, and kept current and accurate. In other words, the data architect must be
able to envision the value of data to the bottom line, and to translate this for
implementation into corporate data models, the corporate metadata repository, and the
data warehouse constructs themselves.
RFG believes that corporations needs to establish the roles and responsibilities of the data
architect in a fashion that allows the architect to effectively act as an intermediary
between the end-user departments and IT. It is also imperative that all the parties with
whom the data architect interfaces fully understand and accept his/her role and function.
Without buy-in at both the management and non-management levels, the data architect
will be stymied and will not be able to perform effectively.
Roles
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