Executive Summary: Unified Data And Rules Are The Foundation Of Instant IT
Digital business is fueled by consistent, correct, and ready-to-use data and rules. Unified data and rules provide this support to all categories of business systems in real time.
Systems of Engagement These systems provide real-time, uniform, consistent, personalized experiences to customers. While most companies have made progress with mobile apps and websites, new interfaces, like voice, continue to appear.
Systems of Record These systems record operational events of the business. The challenge is to keep these systems data and rules correct, consistent, and operating in real time. Too many legacy systems of record operate with their own version of data and rules, which may require additional time and processing when they are incorrect or inconsistent.
Systems of Insight These systems use customer and operational data to develop insights in real time. The challenge is to overcome IT systems complexity with an environment that shares uniform, correct, and consistent data and rules across all business systems to enable insightful analytics.
Unified data and rules are needed to generate complete, ready-to-use applications and systems for digital business operations.
For those interested in a more detailed description of Instant IT® unified data and rules, keep reading or click on an item in the menu at the left to select a specific topic.
Why Unified Data And Rules Are Important
Much of the complexity in legacy IT originates in the need to make data and rules from disparate applications consistent, especially when consolidating data from applications into a source of enterprise information like a data warehouse. Consider the complexity of a typical legacy IT application environment shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Legacy IT's complex environment for applications and analytics – lots of data searching, correcting, moving, integrating, and checking
The time legacy IT demands to acquire, process, and present data is a penalty digital business cannot afford. Businesses today face accelerating mobility and movement of data with increasingly fragmented operational processes that need to process data quickly and often in real time. ‘Being digital’ is becoming the table stakes for all businesses.
Instant IT® Business Design and computer-generated applications and analytics provide digital capabilities, and a central requirement for success with digital business is unified data and rules. Beginning with capturing definitions of data and rules as business metadata, through generating and operating applications, Instant IT manages and applies data and rules in a unified manner.
Capturing Unified Data And Rules As Instant IT® Business Metadata
InfoNovus’s patented Instant IT® Business Design captures the definition and characteristics for each data element used in a business operation. It does the same for each rule and its specified action. For more on Instant IT® Business Design, go here.
The business metadata containing datum and rule definitions, characteristics, and actions are stored individually with associations and relationships as part of the Business Design process, shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Instant IT® business metadata for unified data and rules
As new data elements and rules are added, Instant IT® business metadata content grows and is available for use in new or modified business processes, process actions, webpage and report formats, and other aspects of Business Designs.
Operationalizing Unified Data And Rules From Instant IT® Business Metadata
When a Business Design is completed, validated, and approved, the stored business metadata of definitions, characteristics, actions, associations, and relationships is utilized to generate an Instant IT® application, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Instant IT® applications and analytics with unified data and rules
For more on Instant IT® computer-generated applications and analytics, go here. Instant IT® computer-generated applications and analytics implement data and rules so there can be no inaccurate data or application of a rule. This is a critical source for IT simplification and eliminating work required for data and rules in legacy IT application environments.
Instant IT Eliminates Work Legacy IT Requires To Make Data and Rules Usable
In fairness to legacy IT, the technologies that provide an enterprise-scale platform that supports unified data and rules have only emerged recently. These platforms support multiple data architectures, are easily adaptable to change, use containers and APIs, and operate in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Contact InfoNovus for information on the data platforms Instant IT uses to support unified data and rules.
InfoNovus reinvents IT by eliminating traditional efforts to keep data and rules from disparate applications consistent, replacing that work with Instant IT® automation and unified data and rules, and keeping the focus on the company's mission, markets, and objectives. Instant IT turns IT organizations into sources of innovation rather than just cost centers.