The Original Meta-Model

One of the highlights of my career as an Information Technology consultant occurred in 1994 when I was working for First Union National Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was on a team of specialists called T3 - The Technology Transfer Team. Our job was to formalize and automate the methodology that the software engineering teams and projects used to develop the cutting-edge applications and systems for which FUNB was known.

There was much work being done around data warehousing, client/server applications, and corporate repositories of information. I developed a presentation called "The Logical Repository Implementation Model" that I submitted to two different national data architecture conferences. My workshop presentation was accepted by both of them. I wish I could remember the names and dates of both conferences. One of them was in Chicago in November of 1994, because it was on my birthday. The other one was in the summer of 1994 at Beaver Creek, Colorado at a fancy ski resort there.

At the first one, I was giving my presentation as a workshop but for some reason it was very crowded with some of the conference's keynote speakers attending. I think I must have been the only workshop in that timeslot! As I walked through that model, I remember Bill Smith, one of the fathers of data architecture in the 1980's and 1990's and one of the keynote speakers at this national conference, asked me a question. He said, "Shouldn't the name of your model be the 'The Conceptual Repository Design Model'? I think that would more accurately describe this great work that you have come up with."

Needless to say, I was amazed that he had that insight and appreciated the work I was doing. Then, at the Chicago conference, there was a half-day pre-conference session with John Zachman, the legendary pioneer of the Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework. His session was on the meta-meta model (two levels of abstraction) that provided the context for his famous Framework. It was very esoteric information that he had just discovered and was having trouble communicating in terms that the typical I.T. professional could grasp.

At the break, it was just he and I sitting in the room. I went up to him and said that much of his material seemed to be going over the heads of the audience. He expressed his frustration of not being able to communicate his discoveries more clearly. I told him that my wife had just taken a philosophy class in college and had shared with me some concepts that might help. The first was German philosopher Kant's concept of the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) -- the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. The second was the famous Platonic ideal -- the perfect, absolute, and eternal Forms. Everything in the natural world is derived from the Forms but only as an imitation or impression of those Forms. As I shared with John these concepts as they might relate to his work, I noticed that he was taking notes! On my birthday! It doesn't get much better than that!

So that is the back story behind the Corporate Data Architecture schema, my "Original Meta-Model". The chart below (click on the thumb-nail to see the whole thing) was developed in 1996, while was working as a Principal Consultant for The Registry, Inc., specializing in banking systems, information systems quality, and the Y2K Problem. When I shared it with my senior colleague, Fred Lester of Orange, New Jersey, he said it was the single greatest breakthrough in understanding the complexities and relationships of corporate data architecture that he had ever seen.