“If I was wantin’ to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.”
It’s an old Irish joke about the response you might get upon asking a local farmer for directions. It’s also a not uncommon position taken by architects of newly requested systems when they see the existing IT environment. Green-field builds are always their preference. Unfortunately, few green fields remain when it comes to building new IT systems, especially when the new system is broad in scope and must interact extensively with existing upstream and downstream applications.
Among new IT systems, those supporting a digital business are among the broadest and most complex imaginable. Furthermore, unless the business in question is a start-up, the digital business systems must work with existing systems in diverse ways: exchanging data with them, supplementing or complementing them, or even displacing some of them over time.
How should an architect even begin to think about designing such a system?
Over the history of IT, the system that has most in common with digital business is the data warehouse in its many and varied evolutionary guises. Shared characteristics include: a primary focus on data/information; a heavy dependence on completely independent, unpredictably changeable, and increasingly external upstream data sources; and poorly defined and highly changeable downstream business needs and applications.
The premise, therefore, of this issue of the Cutter Business Technology Journal with Guest Editor Barry Devlin is that a (successful) data warehouse is the best starting point for the organizational, architectural, and technological journey to becoming a digital business.
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
• How does the architecture of a digital business compare to a data warehouse? What lessons can designers of digital businesses learn from existing data warehouse implementations, both successful and unsuccessful? What role would a data lake play? Where do real-time and near real-time concepts, such as the operational data store, apply and how would they need to change?
• What can a digital business learn from the organizational challenges of defining and managing the imprecise and changing requirements of business users? How can business value be proven? Can real, long-running data warehouse processes/projects show how to avoid “change management chaos” and the leaching of value generation from multi-year programs?
• What role can the BI (Business Intelligence) Center of Competence/Excellence play in the roll-out of a digital business? Which skills will need to be changed in the CoC/CoE?
• How will data governance/management be handled? What are the challenges of externally sourced data, especially the Internet of Things? Will data modelling, as practiced in data warehousing, need to change significantly and, if so, how?
• Which data warehouse technologies transfer directly to a digital business system? What changes would be required in ETL (extract-transform-load) systems? Will agile data warehouse automation tools better meet digital business needs? How important will data virtualization be? Where will today’s analytics adapt? What is the role of artificial intelligence?
Abstract Submissions due July 6, 2018. Please send article ideas to Christine Generali and Barry Devlin including an abstract and short article outline showing major discussion points. Accepted articles will be due August 1, 2018. Final article length is typically 2,000-3,500 words plus graphics. More editorial guidelines.
Cutter Business Technology Journal is published monthly as a forum for thought leaders, business practitioners and academics to present innovative ideas, current research and solutions to the critical issues facing business technology professionals in industries worldwide competing in today’s digital economy.
Learn more about Cutter Business Technology Journal including recently published issues!
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