Why this is in my collection
From the publisher:
An Agile Approach to Maximizing the Value of Data Management
Highlights
- A model is a story about the business, told in structure — Burns reframes data models from technical deliverables into narratives that stakeholders can follow; the bridge discipline between modeling rigor and the communication work that decides whether models get funded at all.
- Modeling must survive agile, and that means changing its pace — the book confronts the "no time for modeling in sprints" objection head-on: deliver model value incrementally instead of demanding big-design-up-front; MDDE's answer is sharper still — when models generate the code, modeling is sprint velocity.
- Value first, artifact second — Burns insists data management activities justify themselves by business value, not by methodological completeness; the discipline check against modeling for modeling's sake that keeps a consulting practice honest.
- Models as living, versioned assets rather than shelf documents — a model that stops evolving with the business becomes fiction; the same staleness rule applied to status docs in the vault applies to enterprise models.
- The modeler's real product is shared understanding — diagrams are the medium, alignment is the deliverable; why storytelling skill belongs in the same toolkit as normalization, and why concept-library-plus-article writing is part of the same craft.
- A defense of modeling in the era that declared it dead — Burns writes against the schema-later, model-nothing current; ammunition for the argument that skipping the model doesn't remove the structure, it just makes it implicit and unmanaged.
Highlights on this page are generated with the help of AI.