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gabrielgomane
Retired

The Internet of things to be fully part of customers’ everyday life

Needless to say, Amazon is leading the pack. The online retailer is going faster and further than its competitors, the market, and even beyond the needs of its customers. Amazon is surfing on all the waves of cutting edge technologies, especially Internet of Things (IoT). Amazon’s Dash button, for example, allows consumers to reorder household products, simply by pressing a button from a connected device. Competitors with me-too services, like Kwik and Hiku, are not far behind, with their own one click ordering solutions. But, once again, Amazon is going even further. They have created Alexa, the personal assistant. No more smartphone or tablet, a voice command captured by the intelligent speaker allows, among other things, to go shopping online in a simple and natural way.

Information Architecture Helps Integrate IoT

Corporations must continually transform themselves, and IoT is one of the most promising technology component they can leverage to generate even more revenue. But IoT also generates large volumes of data and presents a new challenge for CIOs who want to meet the needs of the business without wasting their time and their money.

Thanks to Information Architecture, IT departments can streamline their approach to IoT. In IoT project developments, there are indeed different levels of expertise and business knowledge on data between every stakeholder including business professionals, business analysts, and data modelers.

Furthermore, translating the meaning of data from one system to another can be costly in a system development project, and new developers may not up to speed on requirements for new applications fast enough.

Information Architecture can help solve these challenges by defining and analyzing data across 3 layers:

  • Conceptual data modeling: data generated by customers are described in a non-technical way, in glossaries, through a semantic representation. This semantic representation helps data architects formalize unstructured architecture, and build a consistent representations of the organization independently of the way information is physically managed.
  • Logical data modeling: It helps design data, relationships, and attributes using specific diagrams.
  • Physical modeling: tables, columns, keys and indexes can be automatically created through the synchronization of logical objects, while generating SQL code.

Additionally, application architecture allows IT leaders to understand how data will impact business applications, thus to do data lineage (traceability of data). By modeling relationships between the different application systems, including underlying software technologies and technical infrastructure, architects can design how applications interact with each other as well as how data flows.

Ready to become as digital as your customers through enterprise architecture? Contact us to find out more.

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