Data Fusion.Your path to fusion is re-thinking your digital connectivity

So I’ve just realized I think in fusion. Not the nuclear kind, but the fusing of information together kind. I think at some level, we've all thought this way sometimes but just don't realize it. Though why I love data still remains a mystery but here we are. Welcome to my brain.

So…Data Fusion.

Privacy rules and regulations permitting, what would you do if all the data within your company walls, from all your products, was a mere mouse-click away. All that information, aggregated in a central location, beautifully wrapped in an intuitive interface, ready for you to select any X/Y axis you want, to display a complex story in the most simple way, in real-time.

What would that story look like? Would it be historical trends, or future predictions? The key is harnessing the potential that fusion will give you.

Ok ok, so maybe not ALL the products will be included, but we can all still use a little data fusion and the ‘art of the possible’ in our life.

We will all reach a point where we need to innovate on our innovations to keep the evolutionary wheel pointing towards the future. We have entire lakes of data now, and we’re drowning in the stuff. So what might the future of data innovation look like?

Data Fusion is the integration of multiple data sources to produce more consistent, accurate and useful information that is provided by an individual data source, according to Wikipedia. (Btw I honestly thought I came up with this new fandangled term all on my own, but alas google shortly quashed such aspirations by yielding search results).

So I’m not an inventor of words, but as we currently sit in Industry 4.0 and look to the future of the Internet of Things (IoT), these movements are today influencing our ability to fuse digital connections. The concept of IoT is to digitally connect us to our physical spaces, allowing our home products to be controlled by one app, connecting an army of robots through one network or perhaps in the future, fusing data together to give us a real-time aggregate view of data and business performance at the organizational level. 

These digital connections will also have an effect on consumer products by creating ecosystems to enhance the customer journey. The problem is most ecosystems that consist of multiple products are usually only fused at small points as a result of a customers journey, and not by the technology itself. This is usually due to two companies each owning one product each. No two companies want to share their data, unless it was allowed and mutually beneficial. If one company owned the suite of products in an ecosystem, then data fusion would be possible if it was also permitted by regulation.

So if we keep trending the way we are, data is positioned to surpass oil as the next big commodity. Whether you’re using it to fuel business decisions, selling it or using it predicatively, whoever has the most of it and uses it to its greatest potential, will remain competitive in a future landscape. So how are we truly harnessing it?

Data is all around us yet we only tap into a small percentage of its potential. Mostly because majority of our population are under skilled, due to the fact that technological advancement accelerates faster than our ability to learn. We all won’t end up data scientists, but some sort of advancement will happen eventually. Some of us might go on to design futuristic technology to automate the science part for us. Some of us might ride the excel wave for as long as possible and some of us will probably just wait it out for quantum computing.

The fusion of data sounds easy enough. You could apply it at a large or small scale, but if you don't know already, achieving a fused state does have it's challenges. No sizable company has one streamlined central system nor does it house all it's data in one central spot, and for good reason. Variations in system design does present challenges for integration, but fusion is possible somewhere, somehow, in someone's stack, at some scale.

Alas, data still remains a pain point for all of us no matter our geographical location, skill or whizz bang tech. Many of us still don’t know what to do with it, how to read it or how to 'wrangle' it. Add to that, cloud and microservices influencing decentralized architecture models, which then creates an added ‘urban sprawl’ effect on the volume and location of data across the company landscape which then compounds the complexity for analysis and structure design.

Traditional monolithic architecture does pool all of its data, from one product, into one source but two monolithic products side by side are not connected unless they have an API ‘bridge’ to connect them. If you did have a bridge then you could fuse the data, but you would also need one central interface to display the fused data to be able to use it. So maybe scaling this approach up and out isn't feasible in the immediate future.

But do we miss opportunities for fusion in our immediate surroundings and products? I’m sure if we kept it small and simple to start with we could definitely find identify some.

Eventually as our data lakes grow wider and deeper, so too does our need for 'data wrangling' capabilities. We do need to solve for this, it's just a matter of when and how.

Our data experience needs to become more proactive, and less reactive. Plan today for tomorrows future data set. Data enablement could pave your way to a fused future. We merely have to re-evaluate our digital connections and be design proactive in our systems and front-ends, whether or not you chose the microservice or the monolithic path.

I mean what’s better than a streamlined fused data state to stay ahead of the game and elevate your story. How will your future story will be told?

Everything expressed in this article is the unfiltered, jovial tales and personal opinions of one woman, who doesn't have all the answers to life, but does have something to say.