“What do you find most difficult about modeling?” I was asked this question while walking briskly to my Data Modeling Workshop at the Boston TDWI World Conference this last August. Not an easy question to answer … especially before a strong cup of coffee. I went through in my mind my 10-step approach to building a logical design, and after some thought replied, “Correctly capturing the business rules”. Later that day I gave additional thought to this reply, thinking about where the difficulty might lie. Phrasing this in a more positive way, what validations or affirmations are required to ensure our design captures the right rules? After reflecting on a number of recent projects, I believe the following 3 validations need to be performed to make sure we’ve designed the right business rules:
* Validate rules inherited from source or replacement systems
* Validate “dream versus reality” in the eyes of the business
* Validate the appropriate point of time and time span
In this article I will briefly discuss each of these validations with the goal of increasing your awareness and therefore ability to act and improve the accuracy of your resulting design. I will also share two activities that can be performed to help with these validations.
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