Why is a Enterprise Information Model important?

Extracted from the public Notion original. Notion record created 2020-12-09. Last edited 2020-12-09.

The Problem the EIM is Trying to Solve

The problem we are trying to solve with the Enterprise Information Model is maintaining an understanding of the information across the organisation without the need to centralise all decisions regarding information.

Organisations have endless conversations about what should be done in “IT” versus what should be done in “the business”.  However, the role problem is creating a shared repository of understanding that everybody can collaborate around.

Those responsible for changes to IT systems are judged poorly when they break one thing while trying to fix another.  But without a repository that describes how things are connected it’s difficult to avoid this sort of mistake.

We talk about being business-forced, IT/Business alignment, and the need for those in IT to “understand the business” but if we don’t spend any effort on these sort of shared artefacts we are not taking responsibility for our data - we are just finding somebody to blame for failures without doing anything to prevent such failures.

The Enterprise Information Model (EIM) solves these problems.  This blueprint is a starting point for who to define your EIM but it’s also important that you make your own decisions.  You have to decide what you are going to maintain in your EIM and then follow through.  If you decide these need to be maintained and then don’t that’s a problem that must be resolved.

IT departments used to try and solve this problem by creating single-use artefacts such as requirements documents and asking people outside IT to sign-off on them.  This meant that if something went wrong they could always blame those who signed off.  Two problems: IT got the blame anyway; and these documents were never kept and never built a repository of artefacts for future initiatives.

Regulatory instruments relating to data management are continuously evolving.  As the regulations for managing data evolve there often becomes a need to maintain more formal information about the definition and flow of data across your information environment.  The EIM is this case can become more formal.  It can become a “control” in the management of risks relating to data.