Changing your perspective changes the world

Literally. Changing how you perceive the world changes how you interact with it, what rules drive your behaviour, and how you interpret challenges and opportunities that you may encounter. I just listened to a fascinating talk at the Couchbase CONNECT user conference from Hans Boot, an Enterprise Architect from Auchan Retail (France). In his presentation, he talks about the transition from a traditional application-centric IT focus to a data-centric one, and how that helped to transform the company.

Data-centric architectures are the “cool new shiny thing” in enterprise architecture, and I’m sure that we’ll see it’s ups and downs over the coming years. But for Achuan, it enabled them to transform their company from having a physical and digital sales presence, to become a “phygital” enterprise, where physical, digital, online, and offline interactions are all treated as first class citizens.

But why go through the effort of making such a radical transition? Primarily because, like most other retailers, they absolutely needed to transform themselves from a physical VS digital channel-centric organization to becoming a cross-channel phygital organization in order to address the rapidly changing market conditions, consumer behaviour and expectations. By the way, this problem also applies to many enterprises across multiple industries (financial services, insurance, entertainment, utilities, and governance all come to mind).

So how does a data-centric architecture make this transformation possible? In the traditional application-centric IT focus, data belongs to an application. The data dictionary, security, quality, accessibility and governance of the data are all controlled by a primary application. This results in data silofication, often resulting in data duplication (with the associated follow-on problems of data security, quality and governance), as well as throwing up barriers to cross channel data sharing. In the data-centric approach, data control and management is moved to and becomes part of the data itself. This shift allows you to “liberate the data” and provide “Data as a Service”, increasing cross application data sharing, and improving overall data accessibility, security, quality and governance.

At the heart of Achuan’s data-centric architecture is their “Operational Data Repositories” (ODRs), comprised of Kafka endpoints and the Couchbase database platform.

The combination of these two technologies was a game-changer for the organization, providing the foundational availability, scalability and reliability needed to power their phygital transformation.

As with all transformations, the project is never truly complete. There are always more innovations and opportunities to explore. Hans does a great job of discussing this towards the end of the presentation, talking about some of their plans for the future growth and direction of their data-centric architecture.

For more details on this transformation, please see Hans’s presentation here.