Integrating Process and Data Models in a Horizontal Organization - High-Performance Web Databases: Design, Development, and Deployment - page 266

Exhibit 17-4. Simplified integration of process and data models.

McLeod's Systems Analysis and Design: An Organization Approach (The Dry-

den Press, 1994) and other comparable process modeling texts.

The arrows in Exhibit 4 illustrate the interaction or connection between
the data structures in the process model and the data structure represen-
tation in the data model. Each access to a data structure in the process
model is represented by either an object (e.g., customer) on the data model,
or a relationship between objects (e.g., the connection between customer
and inventory, or customer buys inventory). It is beyond the scope of this
chapter to provide the detailed process of connecting the process-focused
model to the data-focused model.

A possible connection can be established between the process and the
data models. Once the process model has been developed, the principles
of object orientation can be applied to the construction of a data model
that will often provide better insight and use of existing data structures. If
a particular data structure on the process model is not in its most logical
format (redundancy with other data structures, transitive relationships or
other problems associated related with data structures), the data model
will show the changes and these changes will eventually be incorporated
into the process model. Exhibit 5 illustrates the creation of a logical data
structure model (entity-relationship diagram) and how it influences the
changes in the process-focused diagram.

The original diagram accessed a complex data structure identified as a
customer rental file. A normalization process generates a data model that