The AI Organization

Chapter 6. The Culture of Data: Leveraging Your Data Estate

AI relies heavily on data, and it will only be as relevant to your organization as the data you use to train it. No matter what scenario you are targeting, chances are that without relevant data, you won’t be successful in delivering an AI solution.

Because data is created everywhere in your organization, it requires everybody to be involved. Your strategy for handling your data estate will need to address not only the technology and governance, but also a cultural change across the company. That data estate includes the operational data in your enterprise applications, such as your CRM or ERP, but it’s much broader than that and may include the following:

• Unstructured information coming from the physical world (scanned documents, blueprints, contracts, photographs, videos, etc.)

• Usage data generated in your SoE applications (websites, mobile applications)

• Data coming from your IoT devices (sensors, controllers, etc.)

• Employee-generated data, primarily coming from productivity tools (spreadsheets, emails, meetings, and the like)

• Global and third-party data used to enrich your own data estate

In this chapter you will learn how to bring this vast amount of data together; we’ll look at the technologies and different approaches involved, and the cultural change required to make it happen.

Technologies Involved

With such a diverse ecosystem of data from different sources and in different shapes, one of the main ...