5 minute read 18 Oct 2021

Data fabric can help companies accelerate their transformation journey and take a major step forward to improve competitive standing.

Team meetings in a creative work space

How data fabric can help companies level the AI playing field

By Beatriz Sanz Sáiz

EY Global Consulting Data and AI Leader

Game-changer, thought leader in analytics and customer centricity. Named a Top Talent Executive Under 40 by AMROP, IESE and Royal House. Mom, film lover, champion for women in tech and the workforce.

5 minute read 18 Oct 2021

Data fabric can help companies accelerate their transformation journey and take a major step forward to improve competitive standing.

Three questions to ask:

  • How can organizations achieve resiliency and sustainable growth with data fabric?
  • How can data fabric help organizations to get smarter, increase efficiency and responding faster to emerging trends and threats?
  • How can organizations take a major step forward in improving their competitive standing?

In today’s rapidly changing digital marketplace, companies formed within the last two decades hold an inherent advantage over companies with legacy IT systems. These digital natives are built on a digital core that relies on distributed technologies, which give them the ability to capture, track and analyze customer interactions in real time.

As a result, these companies get smarter with each transaction, increasing their efficiency and lowering costs so they can respond even faster to emerging trends and threats as they go to market. In this way, data fabric plays a pivotal role in helping organizations achieve resiliency and sustainable growth.

Traditional IT companies struggle to keep pace with these nimbler competitors. For them, gathering data is significantly more complicated since they need to pull data from various repositories before they analyze and share it with others inside and outside the organization. In addition, when they upgrade systems to streamline and democratize access to data, they must embark on complicated system overhauls, which can take months to complete and are sometimes outdated as soon as they go live. Even more, less than 50% of their solutions are ultimately deployed.

In traditional IT companies, less than

50%

of solutions are ultimately deployed.

These incremental solutions are simply not fit for purpose in a fast-moving digital world. To close the gap, companies that don´t have a digital core need to accelerate their transformation. Fortunately, data fabric can help companies take a major step forward in improving their competitive standing. 

Leapfrogging the limitations of legacy IT

Data fabric represents a paradigm shift in how companies leverage their data. By accessing data through one common platform, the data fabric solution provides a single view of data that was previously housed in separate data lakes and warehouses. With the creation of a semantic layer, companies can apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other analysis tools to understand new trends and revamp go-to-market strategies in days instead of weeks.  

AI requires consistent, accurate data across the enterprise. This represents one of the major advantages afforded by the data fabric approach, enabling companies to apply AI at scale and drive major efficiencies through the organization. To that end, business data fabric decouples data consumption from disparate data repositories and works across siloes to pull in data that can be scaled and analyzed. This approach helps organizations run AI on the edge of the enterprise, which enables them to avoid having to build multiple algorithms to link AI into core processes.

In this way, business data fabric enables AI to pull integrated data through this hybrid platform, analyze and then share it with the appropriate parties. By working independently of legacy systems, business data fabric eliminates the need to create an informational system that will move data from one part of the organization to another. 

As a result, business data fabric enables companies to create true economies of scale, reduce cost and apply speed to the organization’s digital transformation. Organizations that have adopted a data fabric strategy have found that it requires significantly less human intervention – between 40%-90% -- to analyze and manage data. This is just one way that data fabric helps companies accelerate their digital transformation.

As companies move forward and deploy business data fabric throughout their enterprise, they often realize five key benefits: 

  • Enable “Trusted Data” - to be consumed across the organization as business data fabric eliminates silos and inconsistencies 
  • Speed time to market by 80% - Virtualization and AI auto discovery data means it is integrated in real-time, instead of days or months
  • Streamline and reduce infrastructure costs - applying controls consistently across all data eliminates much of the effort required for operations and infrastructure complexity
  • Adapt to changing conditions - easy configuration enables architecture to be reconfigured relatively quickly
  • Increase portability and reuse - organizations build data fabric once, then roll it out globally without having to adapt to different data models

For example, when a multinational company sought to deploy a new global payment platform in 14 countries, applying a business data fabric approach reduced the time required by nearly two-thirds, from 30 months to eight. Before data fabric, the company would have had to configure a separate platform and algorithms for each country. Instead, they were able to build one semantic layer that integrated the financial data from each country, significantly accelerating the deployment. This ability to accelerate time to market typically helps companies achieve significant efficiencies in building new business solutions.

In addition, business data fabric helps companies democratize data, easing the flow of information across the organization and allowing more departments to access information in real time. For example, with most legacy systems, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and his finance team need to wait until at least the 20th of the month before they can access data for the prior month. With business data fabric, this process accelerates dramatically, giving them more time to spot issues or developing market conditions. This will be the new paradigm for CFOs in the 21st century.

Business data fabric also unlocks value for organizations in other ways. Companies engaged in an IT transformation can often reduce at one-seventh the cost per transaction, enabling the implementation of a plan to progressively decommission the legacy systems. The business data fabric solution also helps companies without a digital core to launch new ventures that turn them into digital natives at the outset, setting up operations that are significantly more efficient. 

The pace of change shows no signs of abating. To that end, companies that embrace business data fabric will have taken a major step toward leveling the playing field and securing a competitive edge as they pursue their strategic plans.

As more national and regional economies rebound from the pandemic, organizations will need to meet new imperatives for delivering sustainable and resilient growth in an era of constrained resources and ongoing supply chain issues. This will spur a renewed focus on solutions that help companies better manage risk and cyber threats and maximize operational efficiency. EY data fabric approach will play a critical role in helping organizations transform their operations and create long term value.

Three ways that business data fabric helps companies accelerate business transformation 

Technology at speed - AI projects normally require significant time to establish and create connections with the many different sources within a company. Data fabric eases this process, providing access to data for authorized people and business units within a fraction of the time required before. Data fabric also supports automatic machine learning, enabling business units to apply the data without having to become data specialists. In this way, it places AI and data in the hands of business leaders.

Innovation at scale - Multinational enterprises have often deployed different data models for individual countries and regions. Trying to scale AI and new IT across those regions can become a complex undertaking. Through its semantic layer, data fabric enables companies to skip a number of those steps, setting the stage for companies to scale data quickly.

Humans at center - Data fabric help companies provide “trusted data,” essentially democratizing the use of data and analytics to the employees who can understand, interpret and use it to create value for customers, employees and shareholders.

Summary

Data Fabric can help organizations accelerate business transformation through Technology at speed, Innovation at scale and Humans at center.

There is a need for companies to meet new imperatives for delivering sustainable and resilient growth in an era of constrained resources and ongoing supply chain issues.

About this article

By Beatriz Sanz Sáiz

EY Global Consulting Data and AI Leader

Game-changer, thought leader in analytics and customer centricity. Named a Top Talent Executive Under 40 by AMROP, IESE and Royal House. Mom, film lover, champion for women in tech and the workforce.