Strategic data-planning methodologies

by James Martin

Contents

Preface

1 The need for top management involvement
2 Development of an enterprise model
3 Organization of Top-Down Planning
4 Subject data bases
5 Grouping subject data bases into systems
6 IBM's Business Systems Planning
7 Corporate entity analysis
8 Entity activity analysis
9 Corporate reorganization
10 Planning for distributed data
11 Data distribution: Qualitative analysis
12 Data distributuin: Quantitative analysis
13 Recommended strategic planning procedures

Glossary
References
Index

236 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1982

About the author

James Martin (1933) is a British Information Technology consultant and author, who was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his book, The Wired Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow (1977). James Martin was born in 1933 in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, England. He earned a degree in physics at the Keble College, Oxford. He was awarded an honorary DSc by Warwick University in July 2009. Martin joined IBM in 1959, and since the 1980s established several IT consultancy firms. Starting in 1981 with Dixon Doll and Tony Carter he established DMW (Doll Martin Worldwide) in London, UK, which was later renamed
James Martin Associates (JMA), which was (partly) bought by Texas Instruments Software in 1991. He later co-founded Database Design Inc. (DDI), also in Ann Arbor, to promulgate his database design techniques and to
develop tools to help implement them. After becoming the market leader in Information Engineering software, DDI was renamed KnowledgeWare and eventually purchased by Fran Tarkenton, who took it public. He lives on his own private island, Agar’s Island, in Bermuda. According to Computerworld’s 25th anniversary issue, he was ranked fourth among the 25 individuals who have most influenced the world of computer science. Martin is an expert in the field of systems design, Software development methodology, information engineering and computer-aided software engineering. He was one of the first to promote fourth-generation programming languages, and is the main developer of the Rapid Application Development methodology. In 2005 Martin donated $100 million to help establish The James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford. This school aims to "formulate new concepts, policies and technologies that will make the future a better place to be". In 2009 Martin pledged up to an additional $50 million if it could be matched by other donors. This condition was met in April 2010.

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Re)reading this 1982 book, what most surprised me were the contents and intuitions that are still relevant over forty years later. Martin's book represents an early attempt to provide an analysis and design methodology to develop an information architecture focused on aligning business and IT. The book helped flesh out IBM's Business Systems Planning high level method to develop an enterprise model based on functions, processes, entities, and activities, added Rockart's ideas on critical success factors to provide a preliminary version of risk analysis and management. The enterprise models he provides as examples are still adequate and engaging for teaching purposes, his distinction between information systems and decision support systems and his chapter on subject data bases are still interesting, albeit dated. I also liked his explanations on entity-activity mappings and affinity analysis (chapter 8). Martin provides very pertinent quotes, reactions or brief stories by managers, users and DP personnel which make the technical issues come alive.

The book as a whole is quite dated. For example even though mentions in passing some key relational database systems' concepts, they are not clearly set out and although he insists on the importance of achieving at least third normal form, the explanation of what 3NF is relegated to his glossary where it is formally, but in the context of the book, cryptically defined. Although the book focuses on entities, the relations in E-R relations are not well explained -in this book Martin includes relations as second-class entities, which is quite confusing by today's terms. Chapters 10, 11 and 12 pay particular attention to planning for distributed data but many of the examples are dated by the concerns about how to reconcile centralized mainframe-based systems with the challenge posed by the proliferation of minicomputers and “smart terminals”. It is also, inevitably dated, because it was written decades before cloud computing and the development of enterprise content management, enterprise resource planning systems and other enterprise software, not to mention enterprise architecture frameworks such as the Open Group's Architecture Framework TOGAF, whose first version appeared in 1995 and whose tenth version appeared in 2022 or COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies) which appeared in 1996 or even data warehouses for that matter.

James Martin was sometimes criticized as being able to present a sea of knowledge, an inch deep. This is quite unfair, James Martin was an extremely successful and serious popularizer of IT for managers, who also helped DP managers, personnel and students grasp the business and managerial realities of business underlying -and paying for- IT.

Although I owe a debt of gratitude to James Martin's books, as a student and as a fresh Computer Science graduate trying to make sense of IT in the real world of business, I would have to admit that most of his books are over seventy per cent obsolete and I can no longer recommend them to students, only to readers who are old enough to enjoy a stroll down memory lane.