Whether or not you follow what's going on today in Washington, no matter how you voted or wanted to vote, as an IT professional you should be encouraged by these words from President Barack Obama's inauguration speech:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.  We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise healthcare's quality and lower its cost.  We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.  All this we can do. And all this we will do.

I believe strongly that we need to invest in technology education and training, for both short term and long term benefits.  Perhaps some of this investment can be made in data quality, data protection, and information management.  Fewer surprises, fewer sudden failures that increase the risk of public harm.

In a data modeling session about this time last year, we discussed dropping support for a business practice that was fading away.  This model is more of a pattern model, so we have more authority and responsibility to do these sorts of things than in a normal business data model.

The topic was layaways, where customers agree to purchase items, then leave them in the store until a series of installment payments are made.  Once the payments have been completed, the items can be retrieved.  After some discussion both for and against, it was decided that since the decline of this practice was mainly seen in the western world, we'd leave it in for those cultures and businesses that still made use of this business practice.

Guess what?  With the current economic issues, this business practice is coming back into fashion at retailers everywhere, even high end retailers.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/15379a9c-e2a6-11dd-b1dd-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

The arrangement, a feature of retailing in the 1940s and 1950s, faded as credit cards and credit accounts became widely available. Wal-Mart, for instance, closed its lay-away programme in 2006.

But as the downturn takes hold and consumers find credit harder to obtain, some retailers are taking advantage of layaway as a marketing tool. During the holiday season, Kmart, owned by Sears Holdings and the third largest US discount chain, started drawing attention to its layaway service in television advertising.

Sears department stores also responded to the prevalent mood of thrift by introducing a layaway service in the run-up to Christmas, having ended the service for products other than jewellery two decades ago. Kmart said this month that its December sales "benefited from a year-over-year increase in sales made through our layaway programme", as it delivered comparable sales that were better than Wall Street expected, although still down 1.1 per cent.

Makes me wonder what other retro business practices we will see again in the coming months. House calls?  Delivery services? Customer service?

An industry standard data model (ISDM) is a data model available to the public or members of an industry trade or professional association. It is usually managed by volunteers who work for members of the association. It is usually provided for free or for a minimal charge. It is vendor, tool, and DBMS independent.

Examples of ISDMs are:

• Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) Data Model
• Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM)
• Public Petroleum Data Model (PPDM)

There are others, but they are hard to find, as most of these models are managed by not-for-profit or public organizations with slim marketing and SEO budgets.  Another reason is that there is no industry recognized term for these types of pattern or universal data models.  That's why I coined the term industry standard data model.  Perhaps if we all start using it, it will be easier to find these models.

I've posted about a Gartner research note on this topic.

Do you know about other ISDMs out there? Let me know.

I found out about this fantabulous idea from a twitter friend (@WomenWhoTech), who tweeted about how Suw Charman-Anderson has pledged to blog about a woman in technology who we should be promoting as role models to future IT professionals.

I have also signed on to blog about a female tech professional on 24 March 2009.  My main problem will be choosing one, so I plan on blogging about a few.

I encourage others, men and women, to join us in blogging/twittering/facebooking, whatever, about an IT professional role model.

What can you do?
Obviously, and most importantly, please sign the pledge. If you already have a blog, then it will be easy for you to take part. If you don’t have a blog, this might be a great reason to start one! It’ll take you about five minutes to get yourself set up on Wordpress and then you’ll be up and running!

Please also consider putting a pledge badge on your blog now or writing a short post about the project to help spread the word. You can also use the “Share This” link on the pledge itself to send the pledge to your favourite social bookmarking or news site, or to email it to a friend. The more people who send this link to Delicious or Digg and the like, the more likely we are to hit our target!

Also, if you’re on Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Identi.ca or any other microconversation tool, please ping a message to all your friends about Ada Lovelace Day, and don’t forget the link! If you’re on LinkedIn, you could also add it as your temporary status for a while.

It is going to be a challenge to hit 1,000 people - we’ll need an average of 13 people signing each day - but if we all tell our friends about it, I think we can do it!

So sign the pledge and start drafting your blog entry now!

Ada Lovelace Day

Len Silverston and Paul Agnew have recently written a third volume of the Data Model Resource Book: Volume 3, Universal Patterns for Data Modeling.  This volume focuses on data model "templates" of highly reusable, industry-independent modeling patterns such as contact information, statuses, categories, hierarchies, etc.

These are generalized approaches model patterns that apply to every project, every industry, every business problem.  

Normally I'd write a review of this work, but since I was slightly involved in developing this work (I was a manuscript reviewer and I wrote the foreword), I'll leave it to you to read the foreword and to develop your own opinions of the value of this book.

Check it out and let me know what you think.