Few of our clients come to us asking for an enterprise data model. But often it is the missing foundation that is obstructing their digital programme success.
An enterprise data model is simply a real-world model of the data about everything that is important to the organization. It is independent of any of the technologies in play, but enables many essential outcomes for successful organizations, including:
- Data governance and quality – without an enterprise data model, it is an order of magnitude harder to define data owners and data quality rules, because the same data is likely to exist in multiple systems with inconsistencies.
- Systems integration – the enterprise data model allows all systems to ‘speak and understand the same language’, which in turn greatly simplifies integration and the resulting efficiencies and data quality improvements.
- Supply chain integration – especially when based on industry standards, the enterprise data model significantly simplifies integration with external partners, and makes these integrations easier and cheaper to maintain.
- System specification, procurement, and configuration – easily specify data requirements that you can be confident will fit into your existing systems landscape, and lower the cost of adding or replacing systems.
- Data warehouse and data lake design – dramatically simplify the process of collating data and provide an element of future-proofing your analytical capabilities by following the established enterprise data model real-world structure.
- Business glossary – perhaps the simplest product of having an enterprise data model, the business glossary helps everyone understand and established a shared understanding of the terms that matter to your organization.
- Management of data model change impacts – a longer term benefit of the enterprise data model is to provide a map that helps you to understand the impact of changing the way a piece of data is used. The model shows you where the data is used, which systems process it, and what data quality rules apply.
At Data Clan we have developed a unique approach to constructing enterprise data models that blends our client’s business imperatives, industry best practice, and the system landscape. Our method is supported by our DataMAP tooling which provides sophisticated modelling and publishing capabilities.