Enterprise Architecture

From application-centric to data-centric

Digital transformation is essential for every business, but also difficult. What can make it easier is to switch your enterprise architecture from being application-centric to data-centric.

Applications such as SAP are available to anyone to buy and utilize. What isn’t, is your data, whether that’s information about customer purchases, product developments, sales performance or finance. It’s your data, not your applications, that provide your competitive advantage.

That’s why your enterprise architecture needs to change to a data-centric approach.

A data-centric architecture can be recognized by its:

• clear ownership of data (e.g. customer and product data)
• routine measurement of data
• continuous data improvement
• investment in new uses for data (e.g. cross-selling, predictive maintenance, customer self-service)
• preparedness for data growth.

So how do you achieve it?

The Agile approach

Data is what we do; helping businesses to organize it, manage it and capitalize on it. So creating a data-centric approach for your business comes naturally to us.

Working closely with your team, we will help you to identify and understand how your business creates and uses its data day-to-day. This involves:

• identifying business functions
• modeling the interactions (both internal and external) of those functions
• identifying the information created by each function
• identifying which functions use which information.

Once these have been established, we will help you review your current architecture, and change or adapt it where necessary. This will ensure you can:

• assign responsibilities to the most relevant functions
• identify the required supporting systems and technology
• implement them to enable faster, more efficient, more effective digital transformation.