Today, companies must seek to reconcile two very different kinds of information architecture.  Enterprise IT has traditionally been based on a culture of Master Data Management, where internal company data is highly structured and stable by design, and the primary goal is to control, protect, and validate streamlined flows of key operational information.  In stark contrast, the increasingly turbulent public web outside of the enterprise is filled with information that has an emergent structure, and evolves far more unpredictably.  Critically, these internal and external environments are not separate; they overlap constantly across customers, products and other external-facing functions.  In this overlap, much value lies.

To reconcile these internal and external data paradigms, organizations must navigate many tough challenges, ranging from thorny privacy issues and the growing importance of aggregated public data, to mastering the new generation of Big Data technologies and building recruitment and training models that make analytics and visualization second nature across the firm.  Most importantly, the corporate information architecture must now be conceptualized in the context of the public web rather than in isolation.

The goal of this project will be to map out the emerging possibilities for businesses around the future of data, and chart a course that can best reconcile today’s conflicting internal and external demands.  Increasingly, it is not just information technology that is being consumerized; it is information itself.  The consequences of this change will be profound, and ripple through large organizations for many years to come.

Read Venkat Rao's latest blog post on this topic, entitled Six Impossible Things You Need to Believe About The Future of Data, here.