Infrastructure Optimisation
Implement Data SYSTEMS
Is your data infrastructure designed for success?
After defining your objectives and achieving your data maturity, it's essential to optimise your data systems. This involves documenting processes and sustaining maturity in a rapidly ever-changing world and industry. Modelling your business processes and designing your system architecture is key to achieving this.
Whether starting a new system or documenting an existing one, data & enterprise architecture and business processes are the heart of your data strategy. They form the core of your data system, which iterates how your data moves around and the technologies you deploy to shape your data management, including collecting, storing, processing, visualising and analysing data. You should ensure that your data systems are designed to make your data management efficient and make your data available, safe, and reliable.
How can you optimise your data systems?
Implement architecture best practices: Follow the most suitable data & enterprise systems and BPMN methodologies and their best practices. This includes using BPMS, selecting up-to-date, efficient technologies to achieve the objective, setting data standards, data quality assurance, and data infrastructure security.
Cloud computing: By migrating your data to the cloud, you’ll be able to scale, be flexible and cut down on costs. Storing and managing data in the cloud allows you to access your data from anywhere, customise hardware capabilities, expand your capacity, reduce infrastructure expenses, and deploy services quickly with minimal upfront investment.
Continuous improvement: Monitor your business processes and enterprise architecture and continually benchmark your data systems to ensure they’re sufficient. Inspect your data model, processes, and technology stack frequently to see where you can improve and evolve to fit your business requirements.
CASE STUDY: Choosing/Designing the Right Data System
This case study explores selecting the right data system. I recommend a modular, 'plug-and-play' approach to ensure it's flexible and compatible with your company's existing skills. For instance, you can build your own API pipelines if you have data engineers. Otherwise, data connectors can store data on your preferred cloud platform, whether you store your data on Azure, AWS, or GCP, depending on your needs (See table below for a comparison of cloud options). Consider where your data will be stored, such as a low-emission data centre, and the governance implications of storing data in the USA vs the UK (more on that in the Data Governance blog!). While a full ecosystem is an option, a modular system offers great versatility.
Sources: GCP, AWS & Azure Sites
When designing your enterprise system & data architecture, consider methodologies like Kimball, Inmon, or Data Vault to structure your data effectively. A table describing different methodologies can be found below. Additionally, don't forget about your business processes! Using BPMN to model your processes and a BPMS to manage them can streamline your operations and improve efficiency.
After carefully considering all the elements above, I've created a framework that outlines key aspects and action examples for building a successful data system. The framework in the table below directs you to apply best practices while selecting appropriate cloud infrastructure and developing a data integration strategy that supports ongoing improvement.
Ready to see it in action?
Download the case study to learn how I helped a company select and design the right data system, tailored to their needs.
Conclusion
Data system optimisation plays a vital role in maintaining data maturity levels while helping businesses accomplish their strategic goals. The implementation of architectural best practices combined with cloud computing scalability and consistent system monitoring and enhancement allows for efficient data management along with accessibility and security and reliability. A successful data strategy depends on a well-designed data system which allows your organisation to efficiently collect, move process, and analyse data.
Need guidance for choosing and deploying the best data systems?
Whether you're looking to migrate to the cloud, build modular systems, or refine your business processes, I can help you create a flexible and efficient data infrastructure. I can guide you in choosing and gradually deploying optimal industry-standard processes and data systems that enable data sharing in the right architecture and practice for your needs. I can help you build an efficient, scalable and secure enterprise architecture that supports your data strategy and empowers you to scale and succeed in business.
