An Introduction to ISO 15926 November 2011 - iRINGToday

enefit is stability of information exchanges. Personnel can get on with whatever their business
is without having to continually relearn old skills. Instead of having to spend all of their
time fixing mapping problems, the IT group can do more value-added work.
Done right, this can work well for quite a while. However, the longer an organization resists
change the more work processes will become entrenched—tied ever stronger to old software
and aging engineers. Change becomes unthinkable because of the knock-on effects that will
ripple through the organization. Eventually support from the software vendors stops and the
pool of trained users shrinks. The trick here is to know when to tightly adhere to this principle
and when to let go.
“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold
’em…” 6
A second approach to managing a large confederation of applications linked with custom
point-to-point maps is to live with the maintenance and try to make it as organized and efficient
as possible. Under this approach, as applications in the confederation evolve and the
maps break someone will be there to fix the important ones.
We might even argue that this is a good thing because it is a natural way to cull applications
that are no longer useful. There may be some truth to that, but we must also acknowledge
that the pace of innovation and change is speeding up. Business success, in some measure,
goes to those organizations that make good decisions quickly. Good decisions require good
information, and good information choked by inefficient information transfer is bad information.
As with the first approach, we have developed good ways to handle maintenance. There is an
entire business segment devoted entirely to what we call middleware to make creating and
maintaining custom point-to-point maps easier and more reliable. Still, there will come a time
when maintenance is a large cost.
There is another solution, but it is a bit more work up front. Instead of making individual pointto-point
maps, an organization could make a dictionary of terms for all of the applications it
uses. Under this approach, we study all of the software the organization uses and decide on
the meaning of every term. Then when we link two applications we do not map them directly
together but map each to the standard dictionary, as indicated in Figure 1.10.
6. A line from The Gambler, a song by popular Country and Western singer Kenny Rogers.
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