Filing...

In the old - pre-computer days, there used to be a job performed in every office, namely that of the filing clerk. The filing clerk was usually pretty low in the organization - often a school leaver with few qualifications, and with luck and many years experience could become a filing manager. In other words not a great value creating job for the corporation, but one where messing up could add a lot of cost.

Legion were the companies that I worked at where filing clerks had messed up - the most extreme being the travel industry person who didn't know what to do with the "audit coupons" on a paper airline ticket. She filed them in a shoe box under her desk...

Fast forward to the database world and guess what we have. A super fast filing system. So feeding the database is like feeding the filing cabinets. Stuff is put away so you can find it again, but it isn't the operational life blood of the company. The operational life blood is the interactions between humans, the interactions between systems - in reality the events that cause value to be created for the organization. Our systems are event driven and data-filed - not database driven, at least not if they are to be truly valuable and truly model the way that value is created in the information systems.