There are many challenges in developing a long-standing “Legacy” Company into a data-driven organization. Companies established in the last ten years are more prepared and likely to have been conceived with a data-centric vision in mind. However, re-orienting how a “legacy” organization thinks about data (e.g. data as an asset), integrating data into business strategies, changing cultural behaviors, changing approaches to application development, and enterprise architecture are some of the most daunting tasks for transforming “legacy” to “data-driven”.

Aligning the data strategy to the business strategy is now commonly accepted but making that a reality can be a daunting journey. When enterprise architecture considers data requirements to the same degree and at the same level as it considers business requirements, data-centric capabilities become embedded as foundational to the designs of enterprise solutions. This means considering the whole entirety of the enterprise architecture, not just the analytics or reporting portions for example, of the enterprise architecture. When data requirements are embedded in application requirements, the organization is forever playing catch-up. Data is “following” instead of “driving”. That is, the business constantly creates work-around solutions and performs non-value-added work to deal with gaps caused by unique and stove-piped data requirements created for each application. These application based data silos create greater risk and prevent the business from rapidly responding to the ever changing market place.

This presentation will provide insights into how enterprise architecture can be leveraged to instantiate a data-centric operating environment. Different enterprise operating models will be presented to demonstrate how the enterprise architecture can apply a data-centric approach to embed data-driven capabilities within the operating environment. Use cases will include a global financial services company and a donor-supported healthcare company.

The presentation will provide the following takeaways for the audience:

1. Provide a framework for understanding and differentiating enterprise operating models and how they impact the enterprise architecture requirements.
2. Provide data-driven design principle to be applied to the enterprise architecture.
3. Provide first-hand experience through two case studies on how a data-driven approach to enterprise architecture can transform an organization and create a competitive advantage.