The Data Elephant in the Board Room: Driving Data Integration from the Enterprise-wide Data Town Plan, by John Giles
Imagine building a new city without a “town plan” yet some people build IT solutions without the data equivalent.
Chapter 1: Bridging the Management-versus-IT Gap
Chapter 2: Some Happy-ending Stories to Inspire You
Chapter 3: Red Flags
Chapter 4: A Closer Look at this “Data Town Plan” Thing
Chapter 5: Introducing the Core Building Blocks
Chapter 6: Resources and their Classification / Composition
Chapter 7: Selective use of Pattern Elegance (Let’s have a Party!)
Chapter 8: Documents and Agreements
Chapter 9: Events that Trigger Actions and Tasks that Manage those Actions
Chapter 10: We Need the Location
Chapter 11: Describing the Products the Business Offers
Chapter 12: Accounting for the Money
Chapter 13: Classification: A Supporting Pattern for Reference Data
Chapter 14: Getting the Tooling in Place
Chapter 15: Preparing for the Data Town Plan Build
Chapter 16: A look at a Nominal 4-week Data Town Plan Schedule
Chapter 17: Running the Initial Workshop
Chapter 18: Divergent Modeling (from Today’s Pain to Tomorrow’s Vision)
Chapter 19: Did Someone say, “Convergent Modeling”?
Chapter 20: The Principle of Iteration
Chapter 21: Debunking Data Town Plan Myths
Chapter 22: Beware of Concept Definitions that are too Vague
Chapter 23: Keeping Things in Balance
Chapter 24: Communicating the Model
Chapter 25: Where to from here?
The reader will be equipped with “how to” guidelines to facilitate their business in the building of their own Data Town Plan. Steps include forming a tight team, delivering initial value (potentially in weeks), then enabling ongoing alignment of the business vision with progressive IT solution delivery.
Data Town Plans should:
Some people shy away from vital enterprise-level initiatives because they believe they take too long, cost too much, or are simply unachievable. Data Town Plans shouldn’t take forever to articulate, nor cost a fortune. But their contributions should last forever (well, a long time) and save a fortune.
John’s approach allows everyone, not just the technical experts, to focus on what really matters: how data reflects the actual reality of the business and how we can and should capture that reflection to give our initiatives a solid blueprint, while still avoiding getting tangled in never-ending enterprise-scale documentation efforts. The real-life examples and anecdotes from John’s long career not only offer further proof that this can really be done and it works, but also help us remember that it all comes down to understanding and learning from our fellow human beings. Few data books can make you smile while you learn like John’s does!
Juha Korpela: Independent consultant
John Giles has consistently been an inspirational and trusted voice in the world of data modeling, with his prior books, The Nimble Elephant and The Elephant in the Fridge, serving as cornerstones in my own career. This new book is a compelling continuation of that legacy, masterfully building on the foundations he has laid. By introducing the concept of “Data Town Planning,” John positions data as a vital bridge between IT and business, advocating for collaborative workshops, pattern-based planning, and iterative refinement to align organizational goals with technological execution.
Keith Belanger: Consultant at SqlDBM
John Giles shows how a future-oriented enterprise-wide conceptual data model can potentially be created in just four weeks in collaboration with the relevant departments. At its core, his approach consists of a strong categorization with nine basic concepts, their relationships to each other and the use of sample data models for these nine concepts.
Michael Muller: Independent consultant
John Giles is an independent consultant, with a passion for seeing ideas taken to fruition. Commencing in IT in the late 1960s as a developer, the last few decades have focussed on data modeling, from the project level through to the enterprise level. Data integration has been increasingly requested from his clients, leading to quality-at-speed delivery of “Data Town Plans” to something like 20 organisations. While John is primarily a practitioner, his pragmatic focus is backed up by a solid appreciation of the underlying theory, having presented internationally, and published widely, including in his two books titled “The Nimble Elephant: Agile delivery of data models using a pattern-based approach” and “The Elephant in the Fridge: Guided Steps to Data Vault Success through Building Business-Centered Models”.
Please complete all fields.
