Liberating legacy data through data digital decoupling

Welcome to second episode of this three part series on ‘Liberating data: the new paradigm to drive business success and customer delight’ brought to you by Google Cloud, Accenture and Foundry. In episode one we heard about the importance of creating a proper Customer Data Architecture (CDA) as the foundation stone to gain greater clarity of what data exist and where, and to start bringing them together. In this episode we’ll be exploring the topic of ‘Liberating legacy data through data digital decoupling’. Doubtless there are many CIOs out there feeling overwhelmed by the volumes of enterprise, customer and other sorts of business data sitting within on-premise legacy systems. But it’s imperative that they start down this path of ‘liberation’ ASAP in order to deliver the sorts of customer experiences now universally expected of them, and in many cases likely already being delivered by their more advanced competitors. Russell Nash, customer engineer for data analytics at Google Cloud, says trying to use AI without data “is liking trying to make an omelette without eggs”. Customers he speaks to feel a lot of disappointment at the returns they’ve achieved with their existing data investments, as well as frustration with the complexity involved in standing up workable AI and ML models, even with highly trained data scientists on the job. And Amit Vilecha, Google solutions architect with Accenture notes there are many, many organisations still with huge volumes of data still on premise, including data trapped within older legacy systems. Yet organisations need to understand it’s not so simple as just “modernising” and moving everything to the cloud. He adds many companies have developed expansive – and expensive – “data lake” architectures with all the right intentions, when in reality what they really have is better described as “data swamps." They know there’s enormous value trapped within these vast repositories of legacy data, but likely don’t have a clear path for extracting it effectively and integrating it with their evolving digital systems.