Data lakes? Yes. But business lakes?
Perhaps you have heard the term data lake before. The term data lake entered the technology lexicon as big data gained traction. But what are they? They originally evolved from data marts. Data marts are usually siloed data repositories based on data attributes, found in a data warehouse, and they are organized to fit a specific purpose. Lakes tend to be much larger than data marts and are unsiloed, single storages of all enterprise data– in its raw form. This means that they can consist of any type of data: structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. But I assume you didn’t stumble upon this article to learn about enterprise data storage.
So what is a business lake?
What if there was a single store of all your business data, structured or unstructured, in its raw form—available to the entire enterprise? What would it look like? It would consist of all your financial data, your project data, risk data, your performance metrics, your quality data, your HR metrics, your process data—even your soft data, such as evaluative and qualitative assessments, commentary, meeting notes, agenda and action items, and whatever else you needed to run and manage your business.
How does business data differ from data data?
Business data is the information that managers and employees need to perform their work, make decisions, and execute those decisions. In most organizations, business data is a combination of structured data from a data warehouse, point systems, and a hodgepodge of unstructured information contained in spreadsheets, emails, and loose files floating around.
Why is this data important?
If we continue this thought exercise, what could you do with this business lake data? For starters, you could tell a comprehensive story about your business performance— you would have everything from transactional, to operational, to strategic data. You would have your data, your insights, plans, actions, and outcomes. You could link multiple management disciplines to see how your projects and initiatives are affecting your outcomes, how your risks impact projects, which business processes need tuning, and what opportunities should be prioritized. A business lake would eliminate your data silos, and give you access to data that you would never find in your data warehouse.
Does such a system exist?
Yes. Corporater offers its business management platform that builds its own business lake as you use it. You start by modeling your business framework. These can include any number of management domains, such as strategy, risk, projects, compliance, quality, governance, or whatever management disciplines you use. It works as follows:
- Data – from anywhere in your organization, integrated to provide evidence for decision support.
- Analytics – data insights, as a foundation for data-driven decision making.
- Business framework support – adding context to your data and analytics, by modeling management domains.
- Execution framework – creating a means to get things done in the system. Without an execution framework, you will have a reporting system.
What does it look like?
To achieve a business lake, Corporater offers a platform approach that breaks down the silos from your management domains. As a platform, customers build what they want using any of the 100s of ready-to-use building blocks that can be freely assembled to model various business frameworks, such as strategy, projects, quality, risk, etc. These building blocks are designed to snap together, so can easily reuse any of your content anywhere it is needed. Watch Video
Corporater helps you use all your management information, to offer more than reporting or data insights. We help drive business outcomes by tracking decisions, assigning accountability, making insights actionable, prioritizing and allocating resources, and monitoring and adjusting plans to respond to dynamic business conditions. This takes you from data to analytics-driven insights, to actions, to outcomes. By offering a Business Management Platform with your own business lake, you have a holistic, unsiloed approach to working with all your management information, regardless of functional domain.
Corporater truly connects your enterprise— at the business level, as well as the data level. Leverage the investments you have already made at the data level and unlock the potential of your business.
