Which Italy?
A locator name can indicate a geographical, political, or company-defined area; to manage
it right, you need to know what it is

Terry Moriarty                
December 2 , 1999, Volume 2 Number 17

What do you think of when you hear the word “Italy”? My immediate reaction is “a country.” But what aspect of a country is connoted when the word “Italy” is used without any context? Do you think of Italy in terms of geography, the name of a landmass that falls within a specific set of borders along with its cities, waterways, and highways? Or do you think of the governing body that is responsible for managing and administering the infrastructure and laws for everything that falls within that geographic space?

In business, few words can stand on their own. The same term can have many different meanings, depending on the perspective. For example, if your sales force is organized by country, anyone who resides within Italy's landmass is of interest as a potential customer. The sales force is interested in the geographical definition of Italy.

Conversely, your legal department must interact with the governing body that imposes regulations about how you conduct business within Italy. In this case, lawyers are interested in Italy through the business parties that form its government. Governmental bodies are consumers of goods and services. Therefore, your organization may consider the various government agencies to be customers.

Finally, sales and support staff are often assigned to geo-based territories. In this situation, “Italy” may refer to the Italian sales office. That sales office is another business party that exists within your organization.

Hidden Business Parties

An organization's business rules are often exposed and analyzed in a piecemeal fashion. The subject matter experts (SMEs) for one area of the business are often unaware that another area of the business uses the same terms to mean something different. Our responsibility, as business information analysts, is to synthesize what we hear from disparate SMEs and identify those terms and business rules that potentially overlap, conflict, or are hidden behind the SME's assumption that we already know the nuances of the business under discussion.

A business analyst's bag of tricks needs to contain techniques for recognizing hidden meanings lurking behind the SMEs' words. For example, there appears to be a relationship between Business Party and Locator. The same word (such as “Italy”) is used to identify the locator and the business party responsible for managing the geography described by that locator. Country is not the only locator category that exhibits this phenomenon. States, cities, counties, and provinces are just a few of the locator categories for which a governing body business party exists.

Whenever an SME identifies a new locator category, you should probe to determine whether a business party exists to manage that locator. If so, be mindful that many others within your organization may have business rules governing how to interact with this type of business party in which the current SME has no interest. These concepts need to be filed away, so they can be resurrected when working with the SME that requires them.

As we have seen, the variations in definitions of the words “country,” “state,” and “city” are based on the perspective being analyzed: geographic or political. In fact, most of the world has agreed to these definitions. Your organization should adopt these definitions, although external entities control them. However, your organization is in control of defining its own organizational structure. Therefore, no matter how much your organization would like Las Vegas to be a suburb of Los Angeles, powers greater than you have decided that Las Vegas resides in Nevada. However, you are not hampered in any way from assigning Las Vegas to your Los Angeles office. Now, the term “Los Angeles” also means “Las Vegas.” Think of the potential for misunderstanding that can occur when the deliberators don't realize that three perspectives of Las Vegas's definition exist: a landmass, a political business party, and a sales territory.

Data management, as the keeper of the enterprise's business concept definitions, needs to be able to retain alternative meanings for the same term, as well as alias names for the same definition. Likewise, we must be able to identify which business areas use what names and meanings.

Slowly Changing Locators

When you think about a locator, such as your address or telephone number, how often have the components of that locator changed? The structure of the phone number hasn't changed much since we evolved from text prefixes (mine was Thornwall) to the current all-numeric approach. The names of cities, states, and streets rarely change. As soon as a locator is established, it's set, right? Well, that depends on your organization's business rules.

Locators change rarely, but they do change. In the Los Angeles area, street names are often changed to honor movie stars that contributed to the community. City names can change to project a distinctive image. For example, in my area, the community of West Pittsburg adopted the name Bay Point as a better representation of its community's culture. In another community, the emergency services unit changed all the street numbers to represent the number of yards from the closest major cross street.

What approach does your organization use to handle these types of locator changes? For many, even the smallest change can assume nightmarish proportions because addresses are buried in text fields across the application portfolio. Each instance of an address must be examined to determine whether the locator change affects it. Some organizations take a passive approach, relying on the affected customers to initiate the address correction.

Area code splits are now commonplace. They no longer astonish us; instead, we now wonder when the next one will happen. Unlike a simple name or value change, an area code split is more a reconfiguration exercise requiring that only a subset of the numbers within the current area code be changed.

A more interesting situation arises when a country's name is changed or reconfigured, because some organizations maintain a lot of information about the relationships between a business party and countries, such as country of birth, citizenship, residence, and work. If one country disappears and another emerges in its place, does a person's birth country change? Are we doing a value change, as when the city name changes, or a reconfiguration (more like an area code split)?

You can minimize the repercussions of locator changes by isolating all mail, phone number, and email addresses into a single locator application component. Any application that needs to use a locator can interact with the locator application component that determines whether the locator already exists or whether a new one needs establishing. This component should also be able to format addresses according to the needs of its clients, say for mailing labels.

You can further minimize the affects of changes by using a surrogate key as the primary identifier for locator components. While locators usually have an attribute that uniquely identifies a specific locator instance, such as the ZIP code or state name, using that value as the primary key can cause maintenance problems if the value changes. When the value is the primary key, it has been propagated to the client databases. If a change occurs, the new key value must be distributed to those applications. When you use a surrogate key, you can change the locator's value without harming the relational integrity of the client applications.

Who would have thought that all these questions arise from analyzing the structure and meaning of locators? However, this is good news, because you now have an entirely new technique for exposing business rules, whenever you identify a new locator category, by asking the following questions:

•Are you interested in knowing about the political body that governs this locator category? If yes, a business party needs to be established for that organization.

•Is any part of your organization structured around this locator category? If so, those internal units need to be represented through the business party relationship structures.

•If the locator's name changes, what approach should you take to implement the change; proactive, where the organization attempts to make the change when it becomes effective; or passive, in which the affected business parties must initiate the change?

•Do you need to keep a history of locators as they change over time? Is it important to know that the city name changed from West Pittsburg to Bay Point? How will you handle historical time analysis for locators with changed values?

You can uncover a wealth of business rules and processing requirements through this in-depth inspection of a locator's components.

Terry Moriarty, president of Inastrol, a San Francisco-based information management consultancy, specializes in customer relationship information and metadata management. She authored Enterprise View (originally the Repository Report and later the Data Architect) column for Database Programming & Design. You can reach her via email at terry@inastrol.com.