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Building a
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Alice LaPlante

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LEARN MORE
 Building a Unified
Data Infrastructure
Access, Govern, and Share All Data
with Greater Consistency and Control

Alice LaPlante

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

Building a Unified Data Infrastructure
by Alice LaPlante
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 Table of Contents

Building a Unified Data Infrastructure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Data Must Support Operations, Analytics, and Governance 2
Taking a Pragmatic, Holistic Approach
to a Unified Data Infrastructure 7
Combining MDM, RDM, and Data Virtualization:
Best Practices 12
Summary: Benefits of a Holistic, Unified Data Infrastructure 17

iii
 Building a Unified
Data Infrastructure

Today, most businesses aspire to be insight-driven. A case in point:

virtually all enterprises (97%) these days have a documented data
strategy. Although many different business objectives are driving
these strategies, the objectives most often mentioned are improving
the decision making of business users, uncovering customer prefer‐
ences and patterns, and increasing operational efficiency.
Yet only 31% of businesses claim to have managed to evolve into
“data-driven organizations,” and only 28% say they have built “data
cultures.” On every metric except driving innovation with data,
firms ranked themselves as failing to transform their businesses:

• 71.7% of firms report that they have yet to forge a data culture.
• 69.0% of firms report that they have not created a data-driven
organization.
• 53.1% of firms state they are not yet treating data as a business
asset.
• 52.4% of firms declare they are not competing on data and
analytics.

Companies are gathering and storing a lot of data, but the biggest
obstacle to becoming data-driven is that they lack the right software
tools to collect and synthesize this data, according to Prevedere’s
2019 Executive Survey.
Capturing value from data requires excellence in your operating
model, or the people, processes, and systems used to manage your

1
data. Within systems, this means having access to the right data
infrastructure.
Data infrastructure is a digital infrastructure that enables seamless
sharing and consumption of data. Similar to other types of infra‐
structures, it provides the structure needed for an organization to
operate in a data-centric economy.
This report aims to help chief data officers, enterprise architects,
and line-of-business (LOB) executives learn the importance of tak‐
ing a unified and holistic approach to data infrastructure. It high‐
lights the ways in which business objectives are met by the following
solutions:

• Data virtualization (DV)

• Master data management (MDM)
• Reference data management (RDM)

The report discusses these solutions, explains why you need them,
and explores the benefits of combining them. It also shares best
practices on how to build a unified data infrastructure using all
these technologies.

Data Must Support Operations,

Analytics, and Governance
The first challenge you face when building a robust and effective
data infrastructure is that there are three different contexts in which
data is used within an organization:

• Operations (running the business)

• Analytics (understanding the business)
• Governance (controlling the business)

Each of these areas has its own unique data requirements and chal‐
lenges, yet you somehow have to build a data infrastructure that ful‐
fills the needs of all of them.

Operations
The operations domain includes anything that involves the running
of your business. This encompasses everything from ordering raw

2 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

materials, to making goods, to processing customer orders, to dis‐
tributing products, to after-sales support.
The key challenge with modern enterprises is that many of them
have complex and siloed information systems. Data is duplicated
and used throughout operations. While these silos are often appro‐
priate—after all, these systems solve different problems—there
needs to be a single, central point of truth for the data that should be
consistent and shared across all the systems.
The biggest data challenge for operations is data fragmentation.
Chances are good that your organization has set up multiple data‐
bases or even data lakes and almost certainly has deployed multiple
applications, each of which supports a different aspect of operations
and each of which generates data in its own right. So right away, you
face the challenge of accessing that data and finding a way to get a
transparent and holistic view of it—a view that represents that prov‐
erbial single source of truth.
For example, customers of banks commonly request overviews of
current activities and balances in their various accounts. Although
this may sound simple enough, underneath the covers, savings
accounts may be in one system, checking accounts in another, and
other banking products and services in others. Yet customers want
to see the whole picture when they log into online banking. They
don’t want to have to enter usernames and passwords for multiple
systems.
To solve this and similar challenges, many organizations are increas‐
ingly moving data to the cloud, where they can then expose it to
whomever needs it. But some data can’t get moved to the cloud,
either because it becomes too expensive—cloud companies charge
you by volume—or because of regulatory concerns. This leads to
“hybrid” environments where some data is in the cloud and some in
on-premise systems. Straddling that dichotomy presents even more
access challenges.
Consistency is another critical issue when it comes to operational
data. The enterprise dataset has to support all operations, from sup‐
ply chain management to customer relationship management to
post-sales support. If the data isn’t described appropriately using
metadata—data about the data—and if it isn’t measured using the
same metrics, you run into problems.

Data Must Support Operations, Analytics, and Governance | 3

For example, in a manufacturing firm, starting with production, you
need access to accurate raw materials data. You need to make sure
that that data is appropriately and consistently named and uses the
same units of measurement as it moves from the raw materials to
the manufacturing database—and so on, all the way through sales
and support.
The problem with not having a single view of product data means
you might manufacture a certain widget identified one way, yet sell
it under a different identification number. If you attempt to recon‐
cile sales with production, you end up with “air holes” in your data.
Another increasingly common challenge with operational data is
that it is a mix of transactional data and data from the accelerating
growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). So, you may have sales data
from your point-of-sale database, but also data coming from pro‐
duction oil wells, or climate controls of campus buildings, or servers
on your network.
Capturing and using this streaming data in motion from your main‐
tenance management systems, logistics systems, and planning and
control systems so you can optimize your operations is increasingly
an issue. You need a data infrastructure that can deal with both the
highly distributed data coming from transactional systems and the
real-time IoT data coming from remote or mobile devices, and that
can also provide the definitional details, or metadata, such as units
of measure.

Analytics
The analytics data context includes anything that involves using data
to inform (i.e., guide) business decisions. This encompasses every‐
thing from factory supervisors deciding how many widgets to man‐
ufacture next month, to marketing executives figuring out how to
price them, to CEOs determining optimal markets in which to
expand distribution.
These particular usages of data raise specific data infrastructure
requirements and challenges. First, the data silo problem is the same
as it is with operations. Whether for business intelligence and
reporting, self-service analytics, or data science experiments, getting
access to all the data needed to perform a particular analysis can fre‐
quently be a struggle. The problem, again, is that the necessary data
resides in multiple systems.

4 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

For example, customer demographic information may be in one sys‐
tem, but the point-of-sale transactional data—that is, what individ‐
ual customers are buying—can be in another. If you want to analyze
which marketing campaigns customers are responding to, or cus‐
tomer lifetime value scores, or a particular customer’s propensity to
churn to a competitor, you need access to a broad array of systems.
Data syntax and naming conventions must also be business user
friendly and consistent. You can’t have a customer identified as
Cust_ID in one system and Ref_ID in another. Your data infrastruc‐
ture must harmonize that and make it easier to identify and access
the data. This is an example of what is called metadata management
or data cataloging.
Data analysts also spend a great deal of time on data preparation,
with some estimating as much as 80% of their time is spent on dedu‐
plicating, cleansing, and ensuring the quality of data. Having each
person who wants to analyze data do this data preparation them‐
selves is not sustainable for a business. The data infrastructure must
include mechanisms for transforming and cleaning the data and
putting it in one logical place for analytics. This is one example of
what data virtualization can enable: a single, logical location for
data.
The accuracy of the overall dataset is paramount, as it is in opera‐
tions. Many business activities are based upon analyzing data, from
visualizations of past quarterly profit margins to predictive analytics
of which customers are expected to churn or which ones will
respond to a campaign. And increasingly, artificial intelligence and
machine learning are using analytics to calculate things that humans
were previously unable to even imagine.
Many organizations have tried to address this issue by creating large
data warehouses to use as analytics data stores. The problem with
that approach is that many set up multiple data warehouses, and
once a data warehouse is set up, it’s a laborious process to make
changes or add data to it. For known data and known use cases, they
work well. But with the rise of self-service analytics and ad hoc
requests for data, organizations can’t fulfill those requests quickly
enough. The result is that the process can be cumbersome, slow, and
costly. This is why many companies are turning to master data man‐
agement and data virtualization.

Data Must Support Operations, Analytics, and Governance | 5

Governance
The governance data context includes anything that involves con‐
trolling your organization—making sure that it is operating within
both formal regulatory and internal standards. This includes safe‐
guarding the data itself as well as using data to ensure that various
aspects of an organization—financial, HR, sustainability, and other
sensitive areas—are in compliance with established standards.
First and foremost is ensuring that the data itself is secure. Safe‐
guarding data privacy is turning out to be a major challenge as more
laws mandating that personally identifiable information (PII) is pro‐
tected are passed around the world. The European Union’s General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one example with far-
reaching consequences for businesses. California is instituting its
own version, called the California Consumer Protection Act. Brazil
has the Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD), and other countries
around the world are regulating what companies can and can’t do
with their citizens’ data. There are also internal rules around who
has access to what data and what people should be doing with it.
This means you have to be extraordinarily vigilant about data access
rights.
But this requires a balancing act. You don’t want to simply lock
down all your data. Without fully leveraging all the data you’re col‐
lecting, your business would suffer. At the same time, it can’t be a
free-for-all where everyone can access everything. In such cases,
you’re exposing the business to the risk of heavy fines or—worst-
case scenario—a data breach that makes headlines.
Secondly, data governance is also used to oversee the various activi‐
ties of the company—to make sure it’s operating according to its
own principles for, say, sustainability initiatives or hiring inclusion
goals. Financial services firms have all sorts of internal controls to
ensure that customers’ money is being managed responsibly. Restau‐
rants have a unique governance challenge: if something goes wrong,
and customers get sick, how do they trace back where they got a
specific product or ingredient? What was the source of the illness?
Having accurate, consistent data is essential for these types of
investigations.
In such cases, you have a blend of tactics that are also seen in opera‐
tions and analytics. How do you disambiguate the information that’s
coming from suppliers? How do you standardize it so you can ana‐

6 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

lyze it? How can you understand all the connections in your entire
value chain?
Metadata is critical for compliance. What are all the data elements
you have in your IT landscape? Where are you storing PII? Having
metadata that clearly labels sensitive information makes it easy dur‐
ing an audit of compliance checkpoints to understand precisely
where it is stored and who has access to it.

Taking a Pragmatic, Holistic Approach

to a Unified Data Infrastructure
As previously explained, a data infrastructure is a digital infrastruc‐
ture that promotes data access, consumption, and sharing. A
strong data infrastructure enhances the efficiency and productivity
of both the business and technology environments in which it is
employed, increasing collaboration and interoperability.
The biggest problem with building a cohesive, holistic data infra‐
structure that serves operations, analytics, and governance domains
is that most companies have numerous different legacy databases
and data stores. You might even call it technical debt: technology
deployed on top of early technology on top of even earlier technol‐
ogy, all still working and in fact growing every month.
It’s usually not possible to simply decommission your existing data
infrastructure and put in a new data architecture. You have to build
a bridge. In a way, it’s like attempting to fix a car while driving it—
and that’s the challenge.
The most pragmatic journey to a unified and holistic data infra‐
structure takes a coexistence rather than a replacement approach.
After all, you have to live in the real world, and you can’t discard any
of the things you currently have running for operations, analytics, or
governance. But you need more flexible and efficient technology to
address some of the new challenges that you’re going to face with
distributed computing, the cloud, the edge, and the IoT.
The good news is that the three business domains discussed in the
preceding section don’t require different data architectures. What
you’re doing for operations can be applied to analytics, which can be
applied to governance, and so on. This one infrastructure allows you
to embrace the chaos of data being everywhere and anywhere. By

Taking a Pragmatic, Holistic Approach to a Unified Data Infrastructure | 7

layering on technology that provides the necessary controls, you can
also get a unified picture across all the disparate data.
This cohesive data environment allows for seamless access, integra‐
tion, and sharing of otherwise siloed sources.

Characteristics of a Holistic, Unified Data Infrastructure

A holistic approach to a data infrastructure includes the following
characteristics:
Allows access to any kind of data
It doesn’t matter if the data is structured or unstructured, trans‐
actional, or comes in streaming form from the IoT. A holistic,
unified data infrastructure can handle it all.
Enables strong data governance
A holistic, unified data infrastructure ensures that your data is
easily identifiable via metadata and that sensitive PII, Payment
Card Industry (PCI), and other data can be identified and pro‐
tected from unauthorized access.
Ensures data quality in six dimensions
Even among data professionals, there is disagreement about the
various dimensions of data quality. However, six dimensions are
generally universally accepted:
Completeness
It is inclusive of all relevant data.
Uniqueness
No piece of data is recorded more than once.
Timeliness
The data represents reality from a very recent point in time.
Validity
The data conforms to the syntax (format, type, range) of its
definition.
Accuracy
The data correctly describes the “real-world” object or event
under consideration.

8 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

 Consistency
There are no differences when comparing two or more rep‐
resentations of an object or event.
Allows data sharing across business domains with consistency and
control
This means that the data can be equally used for operations,
analytics, and governance without any differences in format or
accuracy.
Is able to work with existing technologies, without having to rip and
replace
This is a big requirement, as few organizations can afford to tear
out all the legacy systems that generate or consume data.
Evolves as business needs change
Technology in this area is evolving rapidly, as are businesses in
increasingly digitized markets. An essential requirement is
putting in a data infrastructure that can change as your business
changes.
There are two technology components that enable this vision of a
unified data infrastructure: master data management and data
virtualization.

Master Data Management and Reference Data

Management
MDM is a technology used to manage the critical data of a business
and deliver a single point of reference for that data. To achieve this,
MDM includes removing duplicate data, standardizing it, and
imposing rules to prevent incorrect data from entering the system.
The result: a master dataset that provides a single, trusted version of
the truth.
MDM solutions also offer processes for collecting, aggregating,
matching, consolidating, assuring the quality of, and distributing
data throughout an organization. This makes sure that, throughout
operations, analytics, and governance activities, everyone who
touches the data shares the same understanding of the data.
A subset of MDM, master reference data, is also important for creat‐
ing a unified data infrastructure. Master reference data is data that
defines other data. It can be an external standard, such as postal or

Taking a Pragmatic, Holistic Approach to a Unified Data Infrastructure | 9

country codes, or it can be internally defined at the company,
department, or even team level. To understand the differences
between reference and master data, see Table 1.

Table 1. Reference data versus master data

Reference data Master data
Constants that define Data that has a common definition across an
Definition
permissible values for data organization
Data standardization Data quality
Value Validation Reduced costs
Data quality Streamlining data management and governance

Panera Bread 2.0

Panera Bread Company is an American chain of bakery-café fast
casual restaurants with more than 2,000 locations in North Amer‐
ica. Its headquarters are in Sunset Hills, Missouri, and it employs
more than 50,000 people.
To manage kiosk ordering, inventory, and food costs, Panera Bread
needed a single source of truth about its data. In 2017, the firm
launched Panera 2.0, its digital transformation initiative, which was
going to digitize all the operations of the organization—managing
products, menu items, café operations, and marketing. A key aspect
of Panera 2.0 was building a multidomain repository of all its mas‐
ter data. Everything from introducing new menu items—which
Panera does weekly—to opening new restaurants is updated in the
master repository.
One reason Panera introduces new menu items more frequently
than other restaurants is to delight its customers. Part of this strat‐
egy includes offering items that may be unique to a specific region
and have an emotional connection or resonance with customers.
This is why guests can find regional favorites such as the gooey but‐
ter cake in St. Louis locations, while lobster rolls appear in New
England (during the summer, naturally). Better control over the
data, which contributes to fewer errors in the supply chain and
operational processes, makes this customer experience–enhancing
variety possible.

10 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

Data Virtualization
A technology called data virtualization completes the picture of a
unified data infrastructure. Data virtualization creates a virtual data
layer that sits on top of all your data sources. It then creates a single,
abstracted view of those sources. You can query this layer without
knowing exactly where the information comes from or how it’s
formatted.
Basically, this creates a virtual data warehouse. The first benefit of
data virtualization is that you don’t have to move the data from any
of your siloed systems into a physical data store. The second benefit
is that querying can be done on demand. When you query the data
virtualization layer, you are actually querying the underlying data
sources. There’s no intermediary data lake or data warehouse. The
information, therefore, is always fresh.
By eliminating the need for a traditional extract, transform, and load
(ETL) process, using data virtualization reduces the risk of data
errors and the need to move data around that is never used.
Data virtualization is also noteworthy for its federation capabilities.
It encompasses data across data warehouses, data marts, data lakes,
and other data sources without having to create a whole new inte‐
grated physical data platform. Existing data infrastructure can con‐
tinue performing its core functions while the data virtualization
layer leverages the data from those sources. This aspect of data vir‐
tualization makes it complementary to all existing data sources and
increases the availability and usage of enterprise data.
Data virtualization is a way to provide some agility and flexibility in
responding to requests for data that come from business users. All
users see is one dataset that they can access and use for their pur‐
poses. It also doesn’t matter what the consuming application is. It
could be a Cognos Business Intelligence report, it could be a Tableau
user, or it could be a SAS or Excel user. Data virtualization abstracts
away all of that underlying complexity to make the data easier to
consume.
Historically, the main use case for data virtualization was analytics.
These were times when you wanted to give access to data sources to
business analysts and data scientists very quickly—when they didn’t
want to wait until you put the data in your data warehouse or data
lake. Data virtualization is a great solution for those instances

Taking a Pragmatic, Holistic Approach to a Unified Data Infrastructure | 11

because the data virtualization platform will connect to all your sys‐
tems and create an abstract layer where you will only see one
system.
Today, the same benefits accrue for operations. We live in a world
where companies are starting to deliver their systems as a service, or
as an API. Data virtualization works well for that, because you can
create a layer of data APIs on top of your systems, which is an exam‐
ple of data-as-a-service.

Combining MDM, RDM, and Data

Virtualization: Best Practices
A combination of MDM, RDM, and data virtualization creates a
flexible and cost-effective data-management platform, especially
when compared to the traditional approaches.
For example, say you’re using an MDM solution to manage your
customer data. You want a truly 360-degree view of your customers,
which means you want to view all transactional data related to a par‐
ticular customer. What products do they use? What’s the last pur‐
chase they made? What store locations do they patronize? When
you combine MDM with data virtualization, you can answer these
questions in real time.
Being able to take data virtualization and infuse that with MDM and
RDM components improves the consistency of and the trust in the
data. This creates a cohesive environment where you can address
multiple use cases at once.
When these technologies are deployed separately, any change in one
of them has to be propagated to the other use, either manually or via
an additional process. When they’re integrated, any change in one
area automatically updates the entire system, so you can move more
quickly and with greater integrity.
The way it works is that MDM takes care of much of the heavy lift‐
ing of preparing the data: finding it, identifying it, cleaning it,
formatting it—those activities that can otherwise eat up as much as
80% of your time, according to the Harvard Business Review. From
an organizational perspective, that doesn’t make sense, because with
that type of approach—without using MDM—what you eventually
find out is that, well, you’re doing it, but so is every other product

12 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

manager. Everyone is cleaning up the data by hand every quarter in
their own particular little silo.
Not only is this a waste of time, but there’s a consistency problem.
You’re making different decisions from your colleagues. You might
have collapsed those two deals for Company A into one deal, but
another sales professional says, no, they’re actually two deals, and
one is a joint venture with Company B. When you have MDM and
RDM in place, you can all agree on what the consistent data ele‐
ments are and what the consistent entities are, and you don’t have to
do that work anymore.
The data virtualization part is really about the movement of the data.
With data virtualization in place, again, somebody has gone through
the trouble of pulling all the data together for you. You don’t have to
go into Salesforce, look for your accounts, and download the data.
Instead, you just go to the data virtualization layer, and it becomes a
service rather than a manual data acquisition task.
The future is one in which people don’t have to do menial labor just
to get to a point where they can do their jobs. They can simply per‐
form the analyses and do the planning and strategy work they’re
being paid for, and have easy, transparent access to resources.
For business users, they know they have a clean, up-to-date set of
customer data. They don’t have to worry about getting access to
transactional information because they have a data source that grabs
that data for them.
IT professionals will see productivity improvements. No longer do
they have to intervene when a user makes a mistake in Salesforce or
changes a record that shouldn’t have been changed. And these tech‐
nologies add more peace of mind for IT, because there’s an abstrac‐
tion layer between the consumers and the producers that protects
the data.
In the past, IT may have had to spend two weeks figuring out what
the data source looked like, writing and testing ETL scripts, and
then setting up the enterprise data warehouse. Because it’s much
more of a federated query, data virtualization can be set up much
more quickly by fewer IT staff, which means less cost for the organi‐
zation as well as better quality of life for IT professionals.
The combination of MDM, RDM, and data virtualization addresses
a multitude of business problems. Being able to expose, for example,

Combining MDM, RDM, and Data Virtualization: Best Practices | 13

master data through that data virtualization layer again ensures con‐
sistency and trust in the data—that it’s high quality, and that the
results of the analysis can be trusted. It also makes sure that that
master and reference data is being utilized by the appropriate
people.
Without a unified data infrastructure, there’s no common identifier
or consistency across your data. There are formatting differences in
the data, and sometimes the data is not up to date. Say a customer
moves, so their address is out of date. Or maybe they get a raise or
get married. You want to make sure you’re capturing these changes.
By combining master data with data virtualization, you address
those types of problems.
With master and reference data, you create the common identifiers
and golden records needed to ensure consistency and trust and high
quality. But then you can combine that data through data virtualiza‐
tion with on-demand federation of those different data sources, par‐
ticularly from transactional data. You can see what customers are
purchasing, what marketing campaigns they’re responding to, what
they’re putting in their shopping carts. This knowledge can drive
new types of analysis and be used to refine other marketing cam‐
paigns or sales efforts to make sure that you’re targeting those cus‐
tomers who are most likely to buy or most likely to respond.

Don’t Virtualize Everything

When you have known use cases and known users, then it’s proba‐
bly a good idea to physically integrate that data and put it into your
data warehouse or data lake so users can access it.
But when you have unknown data with unknown use cases and
unknown users, or when you’re getting ad hoc requests for data,
data virtualization makes sense. This gives you a way to manage
those types of requests and provides you with flexibility, in that
you’ve created a sandbox that users can access to get the data they
need.

Implement the 3-3-3 Rule

When you get a request for data, put in a data virtualization layer
within three days. Then, check back in three weeks to see if it’s still
being used. Is that data view or data service that you built still being
accessed? If so, refine the service and keep it active. Then check back

14 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

again after three months. If it’s still being used after three months,
then you know it’s time to put that data into your data warehouse.
One company that implemented this rule found that most of the
requests—perhaps 80%—for data never made it past the three-week
marker. This allowed them to get a better sense of where requests for
data were coming from and what they were for. It helped them
answer the question of whether they needed to go through the labo‐
rious, manual steps of putting the data into the warehouse.

Have an Enterprise Vision, but Use a Pragmatic,

Incremental Approach
You need an enterprise-wide vision for your data infrastructure. But
at the same time, you should possess a very pragmatic, incremental
approach to delivering it. This means that, for each domain you’re
going to attack or each business function you’re going to try and
help, you need to be able to deliver value, while at the same time
making progress toward your overall goal. You should be very ambi‐
tious around data management, but be patient enough to go through
small wins, step by step, to get there.
This incremental approach is important for several reasons. First is
cost. The problem with data management is that no one department
is willing to pay for it—it benefits all, but nobody is really the owner.
Second, the data landscape is so big and so vast, that if you try to do
it all in one go, you’re looking at a 10-year program. And from expe‐
rience, you know that any project that lasts more than 18 months is
going to fail.
The difficulty of change management is another reason to take small
steps. People within your organization will need to change the way
they work. They cannot continue to manage the data in their own
silos. They will need to collaborate and adopt governance processes
across the enterprise. For all those reasons, a big single program
never works. Again, it’s very important to set a target that is
ambitious, but there should be a succession of small projects that
will add up to reach the target.

Combining MDM, RDM, and Data Virtualization: Best Practices | 15

Take a Model-Driven Approach to MDM
There are two different types of data-management technology. The
first provides you with prebuilt data models to manage your product
and customer data. The benefit of that approach is that it works out
of the box. The problem is that this approach is very rigid. And in
real life, nobody really fits into a prebuilt model. They always need
to customize it.
The second type of data-management technology is model-driven.
This means that what you model is what you get. A model-driven
MDM solution is where you can design your own data model to
define what you want to manage—for example, your own customer
model and your own product model. With data virtualization, it’s
the same. You get a solution that can connect to any systems—data‐
bases, data lakes, or enterprise apps—to create your own data virtu‐
alization layer. This gives you maximum flexibility to adapt the data-
management platform to your own requirements and your own
organizational specificities.

Use the RACI Model

RACI is an acronym in a commonly used responsibility model,
derived from four key obligations: responsible, accountable, consul‐
ted, and informed. It is used for clarifying and defining roles and
responsibilities in cross-functional or departmental projects and
processes. It’s important for putting together a data infrastructure
strategy because it focuses on people—the individuals who are going
to be responsible and accountable for the success of the project.
That generally starts with a core team of operations people to be
responsible and accountable for helping IT with the data architec‐
ture. Then, you’ve got to think of the wider picture. Who’s going to
be consuming the data or consulting with these people? And who’s
going to be informed only?
Sometimes you focus only on the responsible and accountable and
ignore the consulted and informed. That’s a mistake, because you’re
talking about the data that the organization as a whole is going to
depend on and that it’s going to share to improve transparency
throughout operations, analytics, and governance. To facilitate
better movement of materials through the supply chain and through

16 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

the operations chain to the customer and beyond, you need to
broaden your inclusion of relevant people.
What that means is that you should have a substantial number of
seasoned consulted and informed people in your RACI matrix. You
should especially focus on who the consumers of the data are going
to be.

Crawl, Walk, Run

Imagine a quadrant of effort along the x-axis and value along the
y-axis (see Table 2).

Table 2. Quadrant of value versus effort

Low effort High effort
Low value
High value XX The sweet spot XX

Go to that quadrant of projects that will deliver the highest return

for the lowest level of effort. That way, you drive the most benefit
and at the same time build up your skills and systems. Don’t do the
higher-effort, high-value projects until you’ve done the lower-effort,
high-value ones.
The first step is always to get clarity about your customers and
where the data about your customers resides. Those are the MDM
and RDM parts. Data virtualization lets you access the details of all
that data in all those different places. Then you can slowly build up,
investing increasing amounts of money and effort in your data
infrastructure journey.

Summary: Benefits of a Holistic, Unified Data

Infrastructure
Putting a holistic, unified data infrastructure in place that integrates
MDM with data virtualization drives a number of important bene‐
fits to organizations.
First, it promotes agility and flexibility to fully support all three of
the main business domains discussed in this report (operations,
analytics, and governance).

Summary: Benefits of a Holistic, Unified Data Infrastructure | 17

Second, it delivers trusted enterprise information for all data con‐
sumers throughout your enterprise. No matter what data they need
to access, they can rest assured that it is up to date, consistent, and
of high quality.
A holistic, unified data infrastructure also builds a cohesive data
environment that allows for seamless access, integration, and shar‐
ing of otherwise siloed sources of data. And it leverages the best
storage and compute resources available.
Having a unified data infrastructure provides both control of the
data and visibility into where the data is, what it is, and who is doing
what with what parts of it. By having it all unified, IT has the ability
to provide control and protections and get better insight into data
lineage.
But it’s important to remember that, ultimately, this is not a technol‐
ogy problem. It’s all about people and processes. You need to first
establish a vision and a roadmap to reach that vision. What is your
long-term goal? What do you want to achieve? And how can you get
there in a step-by-step manner? Following the best practices set out
in this report will start you on your journey.

18 | Building a Unified Data Infrastructure

About the Author
Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer, editor, and teacher of
writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Alice’s roots are in technology
journalism. She was news editor of InfoWorld for five years, and a
contributing writer to other national technology publications,
including ComputerWorld, CIO, and InformationWeek. A Wallace
Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, Alice
taught creative writing at both Stanford and in San Francisco State’s
MFA program for more than 20 years. A New York Times bestselling
author, Alice has published four novels and five nonfiction books, as
well as editing bestselling books for many other writers of fiction
and nonfiction. She has consulted with Silicon Valley firms such as
Google, Salesforce, HP, and Cisco on their content marketing strate‐
gies. Alice lives with her family in Palo Alto, California, and
Mallorca, Spain.