Data on the brain.

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A smarter way to curate data that serves your platform and differentiates your business.

No doubt, your business has spent the last decade amassing big data. You may think this gives you an advantage over the start-ups that are snapping at your heels. But it’s what you do with it that really matters.

Business leaders have long recognised the value of data; the majority of organisations do not struggle to gather data and generate insights. The real challenge is how to scale it; a huge number of organisations do struggle to infuse those insights across business processes as connected and intelligent workflows, where “workflow” is defined as one or an integrated set of business processes.

Fewer than four in 10 organisations have succeeded in integrating data across their enterprise, or designed an enterprise-wide data architecture.

Imagine the organisation as a human body, with each organ representing an enterprise application. Typically, processes within each organ have ingested data to create insights – but in a siloed way, with no benefit to the rest of the body.

Rather than asking each application to be its own intelligent system, it is more beneficial for the entire body to use the brain as the central repository for data, responsible for pumping those insights out across the business processes within every organ.

As long as data continues to be collected and leveraged within siloes, organisations will continue to create data lakes without the real focus and curation that is required to build an industry-leading platform.

In a Cognitive Enterprise, data will no longer be collected in multiple vertical stacks. These will be replaced by a single “horizontal data foundation layer” – the basis for a hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure – generating intelligence from which the entire lifecycle of the business can benefit.

Once you have established this basis, you can effectively curate and enrich your data so that it informs specific business needs, functions and workflows. As a Cognitive Enterprise operating a platform, this clever, considered use of data is what will set you apart from the crowd.

In order to cultivate trust around your platform, it’s vital to consider the quality of the data you gather and be clear on issues of ownership and privacy. And when it comes to curating data to inform AI-assisted decision-making, it is important to eliminate bias. In order to do so, two components need to be considered. One involves leveraging AI and machine learning to drive data governance; the other focuses on building diverse teams around the AI and putting in place independent checks.

IBM worked with Yara International, a crop nutrition provider, to reposition its data activities in order to create a world-leading digital farming platform that provides holistic digital services and instant advice to the industry. The platform applies AI, machine learning and in-field data to unlock new insights for farmers. Through this significant shift in approach, Yara has built a more sustainable, future-focused business model for itself, all driven and enabled by data.

As organisations seek to find a foothold in an uncertain global business future, stories like this will become increasingly common. Data is your most precious commodity; if you understand how to unlock its value you will be on the right path to becoming a Cognitive Enterprise.

Discover the full story by visiting our website: https://www.ibm.com/uk-en/campaign/cognitive-enterprise