In the previous post in this series, we looked at two examples of facts that would figure in any commercial organization's model of its world, whether or not that model was ever written down. But how many facts (remember, facts are different than data) is an organization interested in? Twenty? Twenty million?
Facts tend to self-organize into groups and hierarchies. So, for example, you could place the fact of the White House's zipcode in a structure of facts about addresses, which could be further embedded in an array of facts about traffic routing. When we articulate the environment of a business in terms of facts, we are building a model of what interests the organization.
Such models are, for unfortunate historical reasons, usually called “data models”. As we have seen, they would be better termed “fact models”. At ACORD, we document and organize our industry models within the ACORD Framework. We have a data model in the software architect's sense of the term. But we also have an Information Model, which is a model of the facts relevant to the insurance industry.
This Information Model defines the common vocabulary of the industry. When I say “defines”, I'm talking descriptively, not prescriptively. In other words, the Information Model reports the facts that the industry uses in its management processes. It doesn't stipulate those facts. The analogy is with the English dictionary. The English dictionary doesn't tell you what the words of English should be, but what they are; and dictionaries are updated to reflect the evolution of language in use.
Working with a model of facts like the Framework's Information Model, managers can be sure that they're asking meaningful questions and acquiring actionable answers. In the next post in this series, I'll have more to say about the evolutionary nature of our industry, and how models cope with evolution.
Comments