Application, Data Architects Duke It Out: Following these four suggestions will help level the playing field

Business as usual. Donna Burbank, product marketing, and Goce Smilevski, developer, both emphasize the need to better understand upper management. Goce believes that the data architects lose many of these battles because reasons such as "cheaper" are interpreted as "easier," "quicker" and "less expensive" by management. Eric Nielsen, enterprise architect, therefore recommends becoming the "business rule champion" on behalf of the organization. "Use the data model first as a means of documenting, validating and communicating data-related business rules, then as input into carefully balanced design and implementation decisions that keep business objectives in mind at all times." Jon Lessig, data architect, adds, "Data that is heavily dependent upon code to maintain its integrity will require greater maintenance costs and due diligence with every enhancement or expansion of an application's capabilities." Johnny Gay, data analyst, recommends crafting analogies the business can understand, such as this one: "Taking the job of enforcing referential integrity from the database and giving it to each application is like taking the keys to the store from the supervisor and giving them to each employee. Just one employee not locking up leaves the store open so anyone can put anything in and take anything out."