We live during a time when the only constant is rapid change. Enterprises are going through a series of huge transformations such as downsizing & upsizing, off/on-shoring, outsourcing, energy transition and markets repositioning to name a few. By trying to redefine their own unique business model, these enterprises are striving to differentiate themselves from competitors and provide their customers with a better value proposition for their goods, services & experiences.
Over the past decade, we have witnessed several major technological breakthroughs that forced these enterprises to define a new digital agenda so as to remain competitive in this effervescent environment:
Large scale in-memory storage and multi core technology became affordable either on-premise or in the cloud. These high performance capabilities are cost effective and available to all enterprises to start and scale up their new data warehouses (e.g. SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances) offers different servers that can range from units with 36 Intel CPU cores and 768 GB of memory and up to units that have 480 Intel CPU cores and up to 24 TB of memory)
New technologies (e.g. Apache Hadoop and Spark) provides enterprises with frameworks to manage, integrate, and interact with data in data lakes and data hubs that will support new capabilities like:
- data science
- advanced analytics
- streaming
- and AI
New modern simple visualisation tools (e.g. Tableau, Power BI, SAP Analytics Cloud, etc) empowers a new generation of data savvy users with self service and augmented BI that is mobile enabled.
This new generation of users will be provided with all the information at their fingertips to support their business decisions
Today, we are gravitating from the ERP / CRM systems towards Enterprise Data (all data relevant for the enterprise). It includes all the data ranging from financials to IOT, internal to external data, structured to unstructured data.
Enterprise Data is the new untapped asset that will allow organisations to drive innovation and growth. This new asset comes with a series of challenges like: data availability, data usability, data consistency, data integrity and data security that requires a fit-for-purpose data governance.
Enterprises need to define a proper data governance to manage this new asset (Enterprise Data) throughout the complete life-cycle so that it can be utilised by an entire organisation.
The modern data warehouse landscape needs to adopt a multitude of platforms and solutions ranging from classic to virtual data warehouses that could be located on premise and/or in the cloud, to enable the enterprise to store and exploit the entire relevant data in real-time.
To conclude, adoption of data governance across enterprises will be paramount for the success of the modern data warehouse.
