The Data-driven Business and Other Lessons from History

This presentation is part of the Executive Summit.

While the idea of supporting decision making with computerized data stretches back to the earliest days of computing, the first formally defined architecture for decision support dates to the mid-1980s (Devlin & Murphy, 1988) with the definition of the data warehouse. The primary driver was the need to integrate data from diverse sources to provide executives and other decision makers with a “single version of the truth”. And among the first challenges it encountered was big data, at least in the context of the computing power and storage technology of the day.

Today, over two decades later, the architectural concepts and methods continue to form the basis for modern implementations, despite radically expanded business expectations and enormous advances in the available technology. The fundamental questions remain:

• How can business leaders derive valid knowledge from electronically generated, stored or mediated information?
• How far can data, in all its now diverse forms and from its disparate sources, truly inform modern decision making?
• What new concepts for and approaches to decision making and information usage are required to drive return on investment in mega-volumes of data?
• Where are the real challenges in organization, management and technology?

Based on almost 25 years of consulting, architectural and implementation experience, Barry will share his views on where we’ve come from in information management, the lessons we can hope to learn, the implications of where we come from and an overview of a new conceptual architecture we need to create a data-driven business.

Devlin, B. A. and Murphy, P. T., “An architecture for a business and information system,” IBM Systems Journal, Volume 27, Number 1, Page 60 (1988) http://bit.ly/EBIS1988