Rewired

Chapter 25Data products: The reusable building blocks for scaling

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

—Tim Berners-Lee

To realize both the near- and long-term value from data investments, manage data like a consumer product. A data product delivers a high-quality, ready-to-use set of data that is formatted in such a way that people and systems across an organization can easily access and apply to different business challenges. For example, a data product could provide a 360-degree view of an important entity, such as customers, employees, product lines, or branches. One emerging area is the use of a data product as the core of a digital twin, which replicates the operation of real-world assets.

More about digital twins

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset, person, or process. Fueled by the wealth of data produced by embedded sensors and IoT devices, enabled by telematics, and driven by AI models that continuously train themselves, digital twin technology is rapidly becoming an important component in digital and AI transformations.

Digital twins have two primary parts: emulators and simulators. Emulators are data products that fuse disparate datasets to monitor real-life systems. Emulators offer the ability to capture, store, and replay data at scale (e.g., monitoring outages in a network operation, exposing bottlenecks on a manufacturing line). Simulators, on the other hand, are software applications that ...