Don't Forget About Database Design

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

 

Okay, you have mapped the workflows, defined the performance gaps, generated measurable objectives and supporting metrics, but what have you done to insure that the database design is functionally correct? Yes, you heard me right: database design. Virtually all process improvement initiatives rely heavily on technology to leverage operations. The foundation of every business application is its database. Get the database design right, and you will greatly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the application over time. Get the database design wrong, and you can expect a bumpy implementation and a TCO that could run 8 to 20 times the original development cost over the next 10 years.

Here comes the hard part. Most of you PI pros out there rely on the IT staff to deliver a quality database design that is "normalized" and that mirrors the "natural structure" of the industry and business the applications are intended to support. Unfortunately, most IT folk are competent in tools, hardware and languages but NOT in database design. In fact, many database administrators (DBAs) are gurus in a specific database engine like Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Informix, etc., but not in how to design a structure that truly transcends time (present readers excluded, of course). This is not because they don't have the theoretical background to do the job, but t is because they do not understand how…

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