It’s not a new idea to draw on data when making strategic decisions – businesses have been doing so in one way or another for a long time. But in recent years new technologies, coupled with an increase in the amount of data at our disposal, have brought about the emergence of the data-driven organisation: businesses in which every decision and process is anchored in data. 

As they negotiate the digital transformation process, businesses that aspire to become data-driven must first establish a data culture. This is done by ensuring that data and the tools to analyse it are available to everyone, and by providing employees with training to raise the levels of data literacy within the organisation. These steps will go a long way towards building a strong data culture, but they do not guarantee that organisations will become data-driven. Indeed, many prominent businesses have failed in this regard, despite investing heavily in technology and resources. 

A key reason for this is that these organisations have pinned their hopes on the concept of the data lake. A growing chorus from data and analytics thought leaders suggests that this is not the optimal architecture to support the transition to a data-driven future. Along with the perennial challenge of scalability, the problem with data lakes is that they tend to be a one-way street. Users extract data from the lake, but they don’t put anything back into it. 

Fraxses, the data platform from Intenda, offers a compelling alternative to the centralised data lake concept. Further to the distributed architecture that leading analysts agree is optimal, the platform facilitates bilateral communication between systems in a heterogenous environment, with write-back and write-forward capabilities. This means that instead of getting stuck in a one-way street, organisations can create a data street that goes both ways. This powerful functionality assures the following: