The goal of data reverse engineering is to analyze a system in order to uncover facts about its design and functionality. Dr. Peter Aiken, founding director of Data Blueprint, developed this technique for the U.S. Department of Defense. He remains one of the leading experts and has written several articles and books on this topic, e.g. Data Reverse Engineering: Slaying the Legacy Dragon, McGraw-Hill, (1996).
Data Blueprint uses data reverse engineering techniques to analyze data and its relationship to business processes. This analysis allows us to map between data elements and organizational business rules, business domain information, system functional requirements, functional dependencies and organizational data distribution architectures.
We will compare the “as-is” and “to-be” business requirements to identify any “as-is” data elements and their embedded business requirements that may be in conflict with or are insufficient to satisfy the “to-be” business requirements. This will help to identify any business requirement gaps in the future ERP. It will also enable us to analyze and assess how an organization’s data flows into, out of, and between the systems and identify any bottlenecks, congestion or gaps. Finally, we will use this process to assess the quality of the existing data in context of the business rules.
Data Reverse Engineering Applied: Examples
The technical approach to a reverse engineering project involves both business process assessments through observation, interviews, fact-finding, and analysis, as well as engineering assessments of systems, testing and metadata analysis. We have utilized data reverse engineering on a number of our projects, including:
Defense Logistics Agency: Data Quality Audit
In preparation for a migration to SAP, Data Blueprint conducted an extensive review of the agency’s data in relationship to their business processes. Data reverse engineering allowed us to analyze and reconcile conflicting business rules and the associated data from three different DLA Defense Supply Centers.
Learn more about Data Blueprint’s success at the DLA
Colonial Webb: ERP Rescue
Data Blueprint integrated data from two different ERP systems into a new ERP solution. Part of this effort included analyzing data from each of the previous systems and mapping it to the new system. Data reverse engineering allows us to streamline the time that it took to analyze the data and meet a very tight go-live deadline.
