One of the problems with Enterprise Information Archtecture is that the logic of the discipline is fine, but it can often lead to initiatives that fail to appreciate the difficulty of achieving coordination across large organisations.

Louis Rosenfeld is a leading practitioner in this area, and in a recent Bloug Entry (Oct 19, 2003) he considers the claims made by Schemalogic's enterprise server product, and asks whether this might be a solution to the problem.

Our experience is that applying an enterprise software solution to what is essentially a culture and learning issue is unlikely to succeed, but the Schemalogic product is perhaps worth a look for large organisations looking for help in managing distributed but coordinated metadata. However, it is clearly early days for this kind of coordination. As Louis asks:

"Is anyone really making their metadata attributes interoperable and merging the semantic aspects of their metadata values in an enterprise setting? Anyone successfully using these products or something else? Applying them to semi-structured text (not data, which is a simpler challenge)?"