Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Boundary Objects and Artful Integration

I once did some data architecture and modelling for NHS Blood and Transplant. This is a UK-wide agency responsible for blood, organs and other body parts, managing transfers from donors to recipients.One of the interesting challenges for this kind of organization is the need for collaboration between different specialist disciplines. Some teams are responsible for engaging with potential and regular donors, encouraging and arranging donation sessions for blood and plasma. Meanwhile there are other teams who need an extremely precise biomedical profile of each donor, to ensure safety as well as identifying people with rare blood types. While there is a conceptual boundary between these two sets of concerns, the teams need to collaborate effectively and reliably across this boundary.So in terms of data and interoperability, we have an entity (in this case the donor) that is viewed in significantly different ways, but with a common identity. In the past, I’ve talked about two-faced entities or hinge entities, but the term that is generally used nowadays is Boundary Object.

CONTINUES IN SOURCE: Architecture, Data and Intelligence: Boundary Objects and Artful Integration