Ownership Principles for Database Design

Here is one of my favorite data ownership references published by the MIT Sloan School, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design (by Marshall Van Alstyne, Erik Brynjolfsson and Stuart Madnick) Copyright © 1993, 1994 Van Alstyne, Brynjolfsson, and Madnick, All Rights Reserved

Some quotes I love from this publication:

“Design Principle 5 : No amount of standardization is sufficient to ensure new data availability.”

“The fundamental point of this research is that ownership matters. Any group that provides data to other parts of an organization requires compensation for being the source of that data. When it is impossible to provide an explicit contract that rewards those who create and maintain data, "ownership" will be the best way to provide incentives. Otherwise, and despite the best available technology, an organization has not chosen its best incentives and the subtle intangible costs of low effort will appear as distorted, missing, or unusable data. Decentralization concerns equipment and development, but it also concerns intangible issues of ownership and control.” (emphasis added)

If the foregoing peaks your interest, here is the abstract summary:

“This research proposes database decentralization and incentive principles which drive information sharing and ultimately system performance. Existing research has identified the benefits of centralized control while formalizing the importance of setting standards, enhancing user transparency, and reducing organization-wide data inconsistency. In practice, however, many centralization and standardization efforts have failed, typically because departments lacked incentives or needed greater local autonomy. While "ownership" has often been described as the key to providing incentives, these motivational factors have largely eluded formal characterization. Using an incomplete contracts approach from economics, we model the costs and benefits of decentralization, including critical intangible factors, by explicitly considering the role of data "ownership." There are two principal contributions from the approach taken here. First, it provides rigorous mathematical definitions and a framework for analyzing the incentive costs and benefits arising from database decentralization. Second, this theoretical framework leads to the development of a concrete model and eight normative principles for improved database design. Applications of this theory are also illustrated through case histories.” (emphasis added)

Keywords : Database Design, Centralization, Decentralization, Distributed Databases, Ownership, Incomplete Contracts, Incentives, Economic Modeling