Not many companies have the opportunity to take a greenfield approach to data architecture. Most have “accidental architectures” that were never really intentionally designed at all, but instead have been built up over time across different eras of data management, according Rick Sherman, managing partner of Athena IT Solutions. But those fragmented architectures can still be improved, says Sherman, who will present a talk titled “Designing a Data Architecture for Modern Business Intelligence and Analytics” at Data Summit.
Data Summit 2018 will take place at the Hyatt Regency Boston, May 22-23, with pre-conference workshops on Monday, May 21. Cognitive Computing Summit and Hadoop Day will also be co-located at the event.
As a consultancy, Sherman’s company goes to customer sites to assess their situations and frequently finds that a company has adopted a variety of technologies as they emerged over time in popularity. Hadoop, data lakes, master data management may have been adopted and successfully so, but inevitably a company finds that no one size fits all, and what they need instead is an overall architecture that addresses their particular requirements.
Most of the time, says Sherman, people will wind up with a siloed approach and fragmented architectures. And now, with new data technologies emerging so quickly, the process of deciding what aspects of data integration and analytics should be applied and in what context is something that nearly everyone finds to be problematic, he adds.
According to Sherman, the data architecture for modern business intelligence and analytics has a wide range of requirements. It must support structured, unstructured and semi-structured sources, as well as hybrid integration and meet the analytical needs of a wide range of users spanning casual information consumers, power users, and data scientists.
Sherman will give his talk at 10:45 am on Tuesday, May 22, at Data Summit 2018.
For more information about Data Summit 2018, and to register, go here.
To review the Data Summit program, go to www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2018/Program.aspx.