I recently attended the second annual “Canonical Model Management Forum” at the Washington Plaza Hotel in Washington, DC (see here for my post about last year’s, first meeting, including Forrester’s definition of canonical modeling). Enterprise or information architects from a number of government agencies as well as several of the major banks, insurance companies, retailers, credit-card operators, and other private-sector firms attended the meeting. There was one vendor sponsor (DigitalML, the vendor of IgniteXML). There were a number of presentations by the attendees about their environments, what had motivated them to establish a canonical model, how that work had turned out, and the important lessons learned.

Last year I also had some recent Forrester survey results to share – we have not yet rerun that survey, but we are on the verge of rerunning it, so I’ll post some key results from that once the data is available.

Last year’s post is still the place to go to get the general overview about why to do canonical modeling, the main use cases, some areas of controversy (still raging), and a list of best practices I heard attendees agree upon.

What’s New In 2011?

Based both on what I heard at this meeting and on other recent interviews: