AtScale Blog

A version of this article originally appeared on the Cloudera VISION blog.

One of my favorite parts of my role is that I get to spend time with customers and prospects, learning what’s important to them as they move to a modern data architecture. Lately, a consistent set of six themes has emerged during these discussions. The themes span industries, use cases and geographies, and I’ve come to think of them as the key principles underlying an enterprise data architecture.

Whether you’re responsible for data, systems, analysis, strategy or results, you can use these principles to help you navigate the fast-paced modern world of data and decisions. Think of them as the foundation for data architecture that will allow your business to run at an optimized level today, and into the future.

Industry leaders know that their challenges with data analytics are spread across 4 areas: confirmation (‘the things they know they know’); intuition (‘the things they don’t know they know’); inspection (‘the things they know they don’t know’); and revelation (‘the things they don’t know they don’t know). 

This last category is often the most tragic for organizations.  Luckily, we now have helpful resources from Tom Davenport's latest webinar on Data Strategy to key research data points on chief data executive's priorities.