Achieving clarity in your data ecosystem is more difficult than ever these days.
With false news, cyber-attacks, social media, and a consistent blitz of propaganda – how does one sort it all out? Even our data and information practices have suffered from this proliferation (data warehouse, data lake, data fabric, data mesh … this is the short list). Data terminologies emerge like potholes every spring in Minnesota roads (I should know by being a 50 year resident and hitting more than my share).
Disambiguating the different terms (advantages and disadvantages) along with a history on the reasons these have developed and continue to be part of most every organizational data ecosystem was the topic for Dave McComb, founder of Semantic Arts and Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy. A conversational style webinar provided great insights and graphics to give needed clarity. Using my prior analogy, it filled some potholes.
Conclusions were that no one solution exists. What did emerge is how things relate to one another, how they are connected with context is vital to business agility, innovation, and ultimately a competitive advantage. Moving away from application centric to more data-centric thinking will inherently get you there faster and with abundantly less technical debt. 50 years of untangling a data mess starts by looking at the challenge with a different, data-centric lens.
