Smart Data: Enterprise Performance Optimization Strategy

5.4 ACTIONS

Here is an example of smart data and smart data strategy at work.

From an interview focused on data strategy with Michael E. Krieger, director of information policy for the Department of Defense, by Ben Bradley for CIO magazine, we learned that he is responsible for providing policy and guidance for implementing the DoD's net-centric data strategy and enabling the transition to an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The DoD is separating data from applications, decoupling data, because systems that are too tightly coupled to the data result in high maintenance expense and other problems. The data strategy gives priority to visibility, accessibility, and understandability over standardization.

When asked by Bradley what the DoD's Achilles' heel is Krieger replied: “the transformation and change required to get communities together to address information-sharing challenges by agreeing on shared vocabularies and exposing and sharing data as a service.”

Krieger said that “industry understands the agility and power that separating data from applications represents. Consider the Google Maps service and the Google Earth application. It is based on a community vocabulary for modeling and storing geographic data called KML (keyhole markup language). By publishing data as a service in KML, the Google Maps service or the Google Earth application seamlessly plots the data on a map or a globe.”

On metadata, Krieger explained how it makes data assets visible or discoverable. ...