Keys to successful business
The business keys or category structures, however, does not identify the contents or class of the documents. For example, a document is not classified as a business key because the contents are not sensitive or essential. However, it could be uniquely identified by the application context. For instance, suppose a Company publishes a weekly business report. This report is a very sensitive document, yet it would not be uniquely identified as such if it were published in your local newspaper.
A Business Key is the distinctive set or column of rows which uniquely identifies every row in an organization. The number of rows and columns, together with their position in the hierarchy can give a unique identification to every row. In a Company, the Business Keys consists of the following: Executive Key, Register Of Products, Register Of Customers, Accounts Department, Finance Department And Production. Through categorization of business keys, you ensure that only the data contained in the corresponding key column (or rows) of each document will distinguish it from other documents in the same organization (avoiding duplicates). For example, if the Company records include Customer Accounts, the corresponding business key will be related to the type of customer accounts (i.e., accounts payable, accounts receivable) and be distinct from each other. It will further be distinguished from the company’s General Ledger, Sales, Marketing, And Financial Records.
To get the business keys, one can categorize the document and assign it a unique string name. The string name could be “Company Name”, “APPLICATION ID”, “Directional Number” and so on. Such categorization will be unique for each document. Such application context-based categorization of the content plays an important role in achieving enterprise uniqueness. This application context-based approach to identifying business keys also helps to solve the above problem of duplicate contents within a database.
The above method is a very good step forward towards enterprise uniqueness. However, a better way to achieve uniqueness across multiple locations is to apply application context-based matching on the documents. Similar to the idea of’sorting through millions of files to find a file of relevance’, using the context-sensitive matching technique will help you find unique across locations. However, the challenge will be to find a system that has the right set of rules for doing so. The following tips can help you with this:
o Virtualization – Enterprise Virtualization provides a way to break down physical and logical partitions to make them an independent platform for applications. Virtualization provides a means to create isolated platforms that run the same software across multiple devices. On the other hand, Business Keys can be stored in a data warehouse or on the enterprise directory server (EDR) directly. Based on your requirements, you can use the appropriate virtualization technologies to maintain business keys across multiple locations.
o Storage as a service – This is a new concept that helps small and enterprise companies to manage their business keys independently from servers. The concept works by distributing data across multiple servers and managing access to primary keys. In other words, a user in one location can check if he already has a copy of a key in another location. Data collected from a central server can also be pulled from any of the devices used by a user. Data warehouse capabilities can be used to build dynamic views of business keys.