Data as a Service: A Framework for Providing Reusable Enterprise Data Services

Preface (Includes the Reader's Guide)

Typically, once every couple of decades a disruptive new technology emerges that fundamentally changes the business landscape. Innovative, high tech products that often start a trend come to the mainstream market with such rapidity that they transform the existing way of doing business. These trends also create a new market that eventually disrupts the existing market and related network, often displacing the earlier technology.

In most cases, organizations that understand underlying competitive dynamics of innovation and who adapt to these disruptive trends, win. Today such fundamental shifts take place in the world of data and analytics daily, and they are changing the global business landscape significantly.

If one closely observes the global marketplace, it is safe to say that many businesses are trying to harness an unprecedentedly large amount of data to derive new insights that support their competitive analyses. A huge amount of data that is gathered from diverse channels (e.g., social media, clickstream analysis) need to be translated by businesses to enable concrete actions. Organizations that understand the competitive dynamics at play and those that can then predictively analyze that data will win, whereas those that fail to recognize this challenge and respond to it will become extinct.

While data has always been considered an essential part of IT infrastructure across most organizations to support their business operations, ...