Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

The Joy of NAD
First Published 30 October 2007
Phil Factor convenes a short meeting to discuss the
data architecture for storing a client's contact details
... how painful could it be? He discovers that even the
simplest database can be a major cause of grief and
complexity.
The Scene: A meeting room in the IT department of a large company
in London. The meeting is in its third hour and the participants lie
slumped in their chairs, like discarded puppets. The walls are covered
with crumpled ER diagrams full of boxes and crow's-foot arrows. An air
of doom permeates.
Phil Factor
(fending off black despair) Right. It looks as if we can't agree on the
data architecture for the trickier parts of the new application, such as
the back office functionality. Let's take a step back and do something