CONTEXTIA™ Information Engineering Methodology
In order to understand the information businesses need to achieve high performance processes, they must first be capable of understanding the relationship between data and information. Information is data within context. The ability to visualize data within the context of the business has been left to particular subject-matter-experts. As organizations have grown and become more complex, the ability of specific subject-matter-experts to retain knowledge of how the business uses data, communicate the usage to others, and support the organization's need for information has become inefficient, costly and error-prone. The Information Engineering Methodology is designed to formalize the definition, capture, and management of the data to support information conversion in the context of the business process.
The Information Engineering Methodology (IEM) is the basis of the CONTEXTIA™ technology that allows for the definition of context and the understanding of the relationship between data and information within the context. Business Information Integrity is ensuring that the information is complete, accurate and relevant for the business process. Since business process performance is the ability of an efficient process to achieve the desired results, the establishment of a methodology that can ensure business information integrity is critical. Business Information Integrity is achieved by capturing and inter-relating:
- enterprise ontologies that describe the business, its processes, resources, and the environment in which it operates;
- logical information models that define an idealized structure of the information that supports the enterprises' business processes;
- physical schemas that describe the structure and format of data sources such as application systems, databases, and documents.
Semantic-Logical-Physical (SLP) paradigm lies at the heart of the Information Engineering approach and makes it:
- able to bridge business and IT domains, achieving semantic interoperability between and among organizations and application systems;
- re-usable, adaptable, and iterative;
- able to isolate changes such that enterprises can rapidly and continually adapt to meet the demands of dynamic business environments.
