Constructing for the Long-Term

This chapter addresses a number of issues that can inhibit the long‐term viability of an information architecture and artificial intelligence. The goal is to help people to achieve a program of smarter data science that can sustainably support mission‐critical processes over time. Hard‐coding is a programming technique that often requires a change to a program's source code any time a characteristic from the outside world changes. Hard‐coding programming techniques can be prevalent across all aspects of preparing data associated with the data value chain: data ingestion, refinement, correlation, etc. To mitigate forced changes associated with data, some organizations have resorted to overloading. A common worldwide business concept that can be used to showcase the dilemmas associated how hard‐coding negatively locks people in is a vehicle identification number (VIN). The VIN structure was designated by the Society of Automotive Engineers and is currently controlled by ISO.