Data Foundations: Strategy, architecture and infrastructure
From destination unknown to a guided data journey
A solid data strategy, architecture and infrastructure allow organizations to focus efforts on where it matters most i.e. value creation. What makes your organization stand out to competition? What is your customer paying for? Where can you improve the customer journey with innovative services or democratize your product and services? If it is not adding value to your customer, ask yourself if it is really needed or if another party can do it better. Continuously making these reflections helps you to grow your core business.
Data Minded helps to drill down to your core business value and create an achievable plan for the future. It always starts with a profound understanding of the corporate & digital ambition, and how data & analytics enable this ambition. Based on the ambition and current data maturity level every organization has different needs and has to set different priorities.
Challenges
Practice shows that it is not always easy to look at the bigger picture when you need to keep the lights on, pressure is put on teams to continuously deliver new use cases and budgets are challenged. As a result companies often use a certain technology or process until it is end-of-life and are confronted with complex transformation programs.
If you recognize one of the following pain points, the time might be right to start a data strategy exercise or reassess your current architecture:
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Misalignment between IT, data & analytics and business
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High dependency on legacy systems and
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Difficulties to attract skilled data & analytics profiles
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Data products that don’t get industrialized
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Drift of ML model performance is not monitored
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Start the journey with our experienced guides
At Data Minded, we support our clients in achieving their data ambitions. Data Minded offers data strategy, data architecture and cloud infrastructure services to help organizations get the most value possible from their data.
Working with Data Minded allows you to leverage industry best practices and take a head start. Together we ensure there is a solid foundation to create long term business value. This foundation is best represented by the AI hierarchy of needs.
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Our end to end knowledge has proven to be an important asset to guide clients to the top.
Data Strategy
Data Minded has a structured methodology to translate the corporate and digital strategy towards your data organization. We start from the value question and work towards an achievable roadmap.
We go further than your techstack definition and creates a holistic view on your current and desired data & technology capabilities and operating model. We look at following dimensions:
Last but not least we also aim to build engagement on all levels of the organization during our data strategy exercise. Data Minded does this by organizing thought leadership and best practices workshops transversely across dimensions & phases. In these workshops we inform and inspire you on topics such as data mesh, cloud architecture, BI best practices, streaming, machine learning, self service,... .
We believe that applying this methodology in an inclusive way in your organization, helps you build the required engagement to build and run a sustainable and scalable data organization.
Data Architecture
Whereas a data strategy helps you translate the corporate and digital strategy towards your data organization, the data architecture study has as an objective to clarify the how of your data strategy.
Together with the IT and data & analytics teams we define the technical landscape and operating model and have a detailed look into all dimensions:
We address topics such as how to go cloud native, how to deal with security, which concepts are needed for implementation (a data warehouse, an event streaming system, …), how to do logging and monitoring, what is the ideal organization and corresponding roles & responsibilities?
Going from your current situation to the desired state implies that you also have to deal with different types of constraints e.g. budget, legacy systems, culture,... . Together we set priorities, create a business case and define a roadmap. Often also a Proof of Concept is performed to ensure feasibility of the data architecture.
Cloud Infrastructure
Organizations often decide to go to the cloud. Most prominent reasons mentioned by cloud service providers are:
At Data Minded we strongly support organizations that move to the cloud for the above mentioned reasons. One would even think that the hardest part is over when the decision has been made to move to the cloud. However, experience has taught us that this is only the beginning of a complex journey.
An organization that migrates to the cloud using mostly IaaS is doing a so-called 'lift-and-shift', or a copy-paste of their existing infrastructure. This gives you a lot of flexibility and control, and because basically every cloud provider has an IaaS offering, it is considered to be a commodity, and the markup of these services is quite low. However, you should not underestimate the time it will take you to actually set everything up and to manage the patching and updating of the OS and other software. In addition to IaaS, most service providers also take patching and software maintenance related work out of your hands with Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service offerings.
Together with your technical team we plan the migration step by step whilst actively managing security, cost and time. Our experts provide you industry and technology best practices.