What has contributed to IRMs struggles in the past?
Many of us who have been involved in IRM initiatives have struggled to succeed. One reason is that our focus has been on the implementation of meta data repositories to support transaction/legacy systems. Repositories help us document and manage legacy/source systems and are valuable for understanding and improving those transaction systems. However, one of the first functions eliminated during the downsizing and business process re-engineering of the past decade was that of IRM. The documentation and standardization initiatives appeared to be valuable, but from the perspective of each individual application there was little value added and business owners were not going to absorb the costs for integrating and standardizing data. There was no business champion and no business need to support the “requirement” to integrate information across applications because the transaction applications are self-sufficient. Suffering from lack of a business need or champion, IT has been unable to bu
