The Continuous Enterprise

For many years now, businesses have been practising Continuous Improvement using Lean, Six Sigma and Kaizen disciplines. This has seen products and features being constantly released through Continuous Engineering and Continuous Development, but where do we stand with Analytics? Most companies continue to perform Analytics on some daily or monthly cycle and the path to new insights is often hampered by slow, obscure processes such as Data Integration and Data Modelling. Indeed, the work that an IT department must do to make data available in a new way for new analytical processing can often take weeks, months or even longer.

But, as analytics evolves to use Deep Learning, Automation and Artificial Intelligence, we are in fact fast approaching the age of the Continuous Enterprise.

Gartner says more than 40% of Data Science tasks will be automated by 2020

So, what would a Continuous Enterprise look like? Data from the field, customer and business partner interactions would be continuously collected, integrated and blended with artificial intelligence to provide Continuous Insights.

All data would be continuously streamed to a Big Data storage facility, regardless of whether that data is updated yearly, monthly or many times per second. Data would then be constantly replicated to appropriate data stores – multidimensional, graph, columnar and so on. In parallel, a corporate metadata catalogue would be updated to reflect newly available data. Data Citizens would then be able to use all data on a self-service basis, to perform tasks including data exploration, data integration, data virtualization, data preparation & blending, data science and data visualisation.

The Continuous Enterprise would see a constant pipeline of data being transformed into information and knowledge, further contributing to the Corporate Conscience. Real-time decision making would be the norm across the organisation, from managing customers or equipment all the way up to managing finance and corporate scorecards. Non-stop innovation would be enabled, whether it’s working with new processes, products, markets or even new business models.

We have the technologies to achieve the Continuous Enterprise today. Much of it can be realised using a Big Data Fabric – a modern, cloud-based architecture that provides Data Citizens with robust self-service capabilities whilst ensuring Data Security & Privacy, Data Quality and overall Data Governance.