Data-Centric Architecture — Can We Get the Toothpaste Back in the Tube?

Wednesday, October 21, 2020
09:00 AM - 09:50 AM
Case Study

The need for a comprehensive understanding of an enterprise’s data assets generally comes after the toothpaste is out of the tube — the application-centric data silos have all been built. The classic result of this is a huge investment in data integration, time spent in sourcing and standardizing data for each application, enormous redundancy in data between systems, and then an ongoing burden of maintenance and impact assessment for even the smallest of schema changes. But what happens when you adopt a data-centric view right from the start? And when that succeeds, how do you roll out the concept across additional business units in the enterprise? Can you, in fact, get the toothpaste back in the tube?

This presentation will describe what happened when a data-centric philosophy was adopted in one business division, and then the experience in leading a transformation by taking that data-centric practice and its patterns from one division and adopting them across an enterprise.

What is Data-Centric vs Application-Centric?
Problems of application centricity that are overcome with data centricity
Challenges in pursuing a data-centric approach
The roles of:
- Enterprise master data
- The logical model
- The Enterprise data dictionary
- The Data Architect
Metadata-driven schema deployment
What have we gained from taking this data-centric approach?
Outlook and opportunities ahead

Dave McComb

President
Semantic Arts Inc.

Dave McComb is the President and co-founder of Semantic Arts. Semantic Arts specializes in helping medium to large enterprises adopt Knowledge Graph technology and Data-Centric application development. Dave has been running Semantic Arts for 22 years. He has led major Data-Centric initiatives at Morgan Stanley, Amgen, Verizon, Price Waterhouse, Procter & Gamble, International Monetary Fund, Lexis Nexis, Goldman Sachs, Electronic Arts, Standard & Poors, Dunn & Bradstreet, and several mid-sized companies. He is the author of Semantics in Business Systems, Software Wasteland, and The Data-Centric Revolution.

Mark Avallone

Vice President, Architecture
S&P Global Market Intelligence

Mark joined Market Intelligence in 2006 as a Senior Software Engineer. During his tenure, he has worked his way through a variety of roles and now serves as Vice President, Architecture. His work focuses on rolling out the Data Management System (DMS) across their organization and the development of the Data Pipeline and Data Glue strategies. He aims to improve time-to-market for product delivery as well as the accuracy and timeliness of their content through these initiatives by providing common, well-known data models, leveraging a multitude of horizontally-scalable database technologies.

Hamish Brookeman

VP - Enterprise Data Architecture
S&P Global Enterprise Data Organization

Hamish is responsible for Enterprise Data Architecture, which is responsible for the overall design of managed data structures, including strategies for data implementation, acquisition, and maintenance, and evaluating data sources for adherence to quality standards and ease of integration. The specific role is to capture data requirements clearly, completely, and correctly, and represent them in a formal and visual way through the data models. In addition, making sure that data integration is based on a common metadata framework and that the integrated data is presented to the business as valid information.

Hamish previously served in a similar role for S&P Global Market Intelligence. Hamish joined S&P Global in 2015 via the SNL Financial acquisition, where he had served as Head of Data Architecture since 2006.

Hamish has 25+ years of experience in technology leadership, large abstract datasets, and highly engineered information systems. He has extensive knowledge of Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured data strategies. Hamish attended Princeton University, where he studied Economics and Politics.