Why Decoupling Data is Critical to Digital Transformation
Is Data Decoupling on your radar for 2023? For every CIO, CTO or Department Leader, it should be. It’s the one common thread in digital transformation projects that will always bite you if you haven’t sorted it.
Why Gartner will be talking up Data Fabrics and Composable Architecture so much this year
“Siri — Can you tell me who my top 10 customers are this quarter and give me a breakdown of their profitability please?” Sure. You wish.
The reality for most business leaders and digital workers is that every time you think about a new question about your business, you will have to get some poor soul copying and pasting data into spreadsheets, crunching the data, sorting out the cruel data anomalies, before doing what they can to make sense of it through self-service tools.
Do all this, and you still might not be able to answer your question, because it’s rare for data repositories to talk to one another, or have the necessary data relationships in place to compare different tables held in discrete locations.
The problem is, data is bundled into the software apps you use
Unfortunately, this modern world of cloud computing, Software as a Service apps, legacy systems, etc. — not forgetting platforms like Amazon, Facebook and Google — mean your data is not neatly organized in a single place. Ask Siri to go answer questions and the only response you will get is, “Sorry, I don’t have that information.” We all know how that feels.
Separating data from systems
Today, IT spend is very much dictated by departments, not IT. For many reasons, this change has been good, because it has increased the pace of IT democratization. Unfortunately, this approach to IT decision-making has led to further fragmentation and less investment in horizontal architectural initiatives.
Why bother investing in data?
Boston Consulting Group recently published an article on data decoupling stating — “Successful digital transformation requires decoupling the data layer from legacy IT so that companies aren’t forced to modernize their enterprise resource planning systems all at once — an expensive, time-consuming, and risky proposition. Companies that implement data and digital platforms — separating the data layer from legacy IT — can scale up new digital services faster, while upgrading their core IT.”
Gartner is equally enthusiastic, if not quite so eloquent, on the topic of designing a composability architecture that breaks down services into more reusable chunks. They say — “As business needs change, organizations must be able to deliver innovation quickly and adapt applications dynamically — reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise. To do this, organizations must understand and implement the “composable enterprise.”
Businesses will invest in decoupling architectures to:
- Liberate data from old, inflexible legacy core systems
- Transfer the ownership of data from IT to the business
- Bring data transparency to create a curious, learn fast/fail fast, data-driven decisioning culture
- Speed time to value of new projects and digital services
What does a data decoupling architecture look like?
If you want to reuse data, you need to organize it first. That means investing in a decoupling architecture, and the technological capabilities you need to achieve it. To form a data fabric across your enterprise and make data composable, you will need to enrich your current IT with a few more gadgets (if you don’t already have them). Things like:
Data harvesting and organization components
- Infrastructure as a service and cloud-native provisioning to negate the use of poorly utilized in-house server infrastructure.
- Data Mashups and Software Bots to augment data feed information flows using upload templates, watch folders, scheduled events, etc. to harvest data from existing systems and data sources.
- Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tooling, often powered by fuzzy logic and AI, to cleanse, normalize, enrich and organize data.
- Database systems design and provisioning to create and organize relational and flat file databases to maximize data relationships and reuse.
- Infrastructure Platform-as-a-Service and codeless data connectors to connect reporting systems to legacy systems and other data sources without having to code an interface.
Application components
- Application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) — to provision services in support of the design, deployment, and operation of software applications.
- Application Fabric — A cloud platform to manage the publishing and organization of large numbers of discrete software applications used by digital workers to consume data.
- Cloud infrastructure services — A cloud platform to administer cloud infrastructural deployments, data security, replication and scaling.
- Cloud-native clustered deployments of secure private clouds at scale — A cloud platform service used to provision clustered private cloud deployments, thereby removing the need for administrators to log in to successive discrete sessions when supporting multiples of private clouds (something that often happens when businesses operate sales channels and supply chains).
Service delivery components
- Integration with popular desktop and reporting tools
- Reporting services to publish dashboards, charts, and reports
- Information flow design tooling to create email/SMS alerts and notifications
- Low-code/No-code/Codeless applications design and publishing services (to build apps needed to implement changes to processes resulting from
- Digital documents to democratize data use and consumption
- AI chatbot human interfaces, so digital workers can ask questions
Read the full article on Decoupling Architecture here.
Ian Tomlin is a seasoned marketer, entrepreneur, and business leader with a 30+ year career at the intersection of strategy, technology, and marketing. As the founder of successful businesses, including Newton Day Ltd, Ian brings a wealth of expertise in guiding companies toward compelling brand stories. Reach out to Ian via LinkedIn to transform your marketing approach and tell your brand story effectively.
