The Right Way to Use Canonical Models: Three Lessons from the Field

2/16/2026

Data standardization is one of the most tempting ideas in enterprise architecture. The promise is elegant: instead of maintaining dozens of different integrations between your systems, create one standard data format that everything uses. One language. Clean connections. Order from chaos. Many insurance companies invest millions in this vision. And many discover, often too late, that they've built something that looks perfect in diagrams but struggles in practice. The problem isn't canonical models themselves. It's where and how companies use them. Let me share three lessons that can help you get real value from standardization without the common pitfalls.