When I tell folks about these design challenges, I sometimes receive comments like "So you get other people to solve your problems?". I laugh when I hear these comments, but for this particular design challenge there is some truth to this statement. This design challenge comes from my company.

As many of you know, I work for a global manufacturing company, which has a very complex applications landscape including a few large ERP packages. To understand how the pieces fit together, we created a enterprise data model at a very high level of detail, along with somewhat more detailed (but still at a high level) models for each application. For example, the enterprise model might have a subject area called "Material", yet application XYZ has the more detailed concepts within material, such as Raw, Semi-finished, and Packaging materials.

All is well in the world until a key business user from application XYZ realizes the value of these high level models, and is so excited that he goes off and creates his own model of XYZ. Not only is his model different from the XYZ model that we've produced centrally (he felt the  existing company model of XYZ was not accurate in certain areas), but he used his own modeling notation and tool, quite different from our global standards.