The Rise of Logical Data Management

Chapter 5. The Semantics of Business

Successful businesses make decisions based on data. In the past, these key decisions fell to company leadership and executive officers. They relied on dashboards and reports designed to give them insight into how the business was performing. Today, however, many organizations are realizing that decision making at the top level is not enough. They need to empower employees to make good choices at all levels of the organization. As a result, there is a push toward data democratization.

Data democratization is the process of enabling data access throughout an organization to empower employees to make informed decisions. This is a very powerful and beneficial idea, but first, your company needs to answer some challenging questions:

• How does your company get the right data to the right people?

• How can that data be made accessible and understandable to all its consumers?

• How does your company ensure that the data being used is accurate and reliable?

• How can your company deliver data in a timely manner to promote decision making that is closer to real time?

The major obstacle underlying all of these questions is disparate, diverse, complex, non-user-friendly data. In addition, these data sources often lack quality, documentation, and insight into their lineage. The data sources your employees rely on to make decisions can be from anywhere. They can be housed in different formats, different structures, and different security models. Based ...