Over the course of many recent conversations with enterprise buyers of IT and business process services, one theme stood out: the importance of creating a data foundation for their organization that ensures the consistency, interoperability, quality, availability, and accessibility of data.
A robust data foundation is a prerequisite for all the promising technologies researched, considered, piloted or scaled in operations: from classic SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) to 3D printing, chat-bots, robotic process automation, drones, machine learning, IoT and blockchain.