Unlocking the Untapped Value of Enterprise Data and Aligning the Organization: Why AI Alone Isn’t Enough
In today’s world, data is often described as the most valuable resource on the planet – a resource more valuable than oil in reshaping industries, economies, and societies. Yet despite the billions of dollars invested in enterprise technology and, more recently, artificial intelligence (AI), most organizations are still leaving enormous economic value on the table.
Consider this – When enterprise data is completely harmonized across the organization, its economic potential multiplies exponentially…
Imagine the ability to:
- Eliminate redundant processes and reduce operating costs.
- Improve decision-making with real-time, enterprise-wide insights.
- Drive double-digit revenue growth by aligning sales, marketing, and service strategies around a single, accurate, and cohesive view of customers and opportunities.
- Unlock billions in working capital by connecting supply chains, financial systems, and operational data into a single integrated view.
These simple examples represent merely a starting point… Analysts estimate that trillions of dollars in productivity and growth are waiting to be unlocked globally through effective data harmonization. For a single enterprise, the upside can mean transforming data from a liability of disconnected systems into its most valuable corporate asset.
Realizing the value of AI Starts with the Alignment of Enterprise IT Infrastructures
For decades, enterprise IT has been built on dis-integrated systems: a patchwork of vendor products, technologies, and databases. This fragmented and narrow approach to enterprise operations has created:
- Islands of technology lacking the bridges needed to effectively communicate.
- Incompatible data types that resist cohesion and aggregation.
- Departmental silos where critical insights and their enormous potentials remain trapped and limited.
No other industry operates from a platform of disintegration the way enterprise IT does. Consider a few analogies:
- Electrical: Imagine if every outlet in your home was different – forcing you to use a unique adaptor every time you plugged in a device.
- Automobiles: Imagine if every auto manufacturer designed cars to operate differently, requiring you to re-learn how to drive – start, stop, accelerate, and brake – for each make and model. Now multiply that effort by the number of manufacturers worldwide.
- Healthcare: Imagine if medical procedures were administered at the whim of individual doctors, rather than adhering to proven and standardized best practices.
These examples may sound almost ridiculous – but aren’t they effective analogies for the way enterprise IT systems have been designed, acquired, and operated for decades? Virtually every system is built without interoperability in mind, leaving enterprises with the burden of adaptors, workarounds, and inefficiencies.
The result? Enterprise leaders now face a difficult question: Why have we spent decades investing in systems that can’t interoperate, and what is the true cost of that fragmentation today?
Collective Intelligence – The Untapped Treasure in Enterprise Data
Ironically, some of the most valuable and comprehensive insights remain unexploited, locked away within the dis-integrated elements of enterprise infrastructures. These insights are scattered across ERP systems, BPO workflows, BPA platforms, departmental applications, and countless other systems.
Properly harnessed, this data could:
- Drive tremendous increases in revenue.
- Improve customer service and loyalty.
- Sharpen marketing effectiveness.
- Strengthen organizational alignment and efficiency.
In other words, the systems and data enterprises already own could become their most powerful driver of growth – if only they could be seamlessly accessed, integrated, and harmonized.
We refer to this as Collective Intelligence: the complete alignment of systems, data, business processes, and subject matter expertise, all centered around a single, accurate, and cohesive foundation of enterprise data. Collective Intelligence transforms disconnected inputs into enterprise-wide insights and actions, unlocking a holistic view of customers, markets, and operations that siloed systems can never deliver.
Why Data Harmonization Matters More Than Ever
Before organizations invest further in AI, it is essential to unify and harmonize their data. That means:
- Breaking down departmental silos.
- Standardizing disparate formats.
- Connecting ERP, BPO, BPA, and other systems in ways that allow data to flow seamlessly.
Again, the payoff is substantial: a cohesive, 360-degree understanding of clients, markets, supply chains, tariffs, and even geopolitical conditions.
AI as a Multiplier – Not a Substitute
Too many enterprises leap headfirst into AI investments, hoping the technology will magically solve the data problem. But without harmonized data, AI models are only as smart as the silos they draw from. Where organizations have laid the groundwork through integration and unification, AI delivers outsized value:
- Better predictions.
- Faster insights.
- Smarter, more strategic decisions.
Enterprise AI Is Not ChatGPT
It is important to draw a clear distinction: Enterprise AI is not ChatGPT.
Due to decades of investment in dis-integrated systems, enterprise AI is often considered to be vastly more complex and reliant on far more sophisticated efforts to achieve meaningful business results.
ChatGPT and similar technologies have had a seismic global impact, but they are often perceived as an advanced search or query capability – delivering sophisticated responses to public information correlation challenges. This is not the same as applying AI to the complex, messy, and siloed data that exists inside the enterprise firewall.
For enterprise use cases, AI will only be as effective as the data foundation it relies on. That means organizations must first tackle the data disintegration challenge – harmonizing and unifying their information – before AI-based applications can deliver the measurable business outcomes they promise.
The Path Forward
The future belongs to enterprises that recognize data harmonization as the essential precursor to AI success. By unlocking the value of the data they already hold, enterprises can transform their investments in AI from experimental projects into engines of growth and differentiation. The future promise of AI as a workforce multiplier and a powerful growth engine is real – but only if we revisit our fundamental IT strategies with a renewed focus on cohesiveness, interoperability, and integration.
On a personal note: in my 30+ year career in the software industry, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the world’s largest enterprises, building agreements and business models that span virtually every continent. I’ve seen firsthand the siloed strategies I’ve described here – and as a consumer, I continue to experience the disconnection of data in my relationships with banks, insurers, healthcare providers, and countless others.
That experience has convinced me of one thing: the greatest advances for business and society alike will come not from chasing the next wave of AI hype, but from turning inward – reinvesting in the foundational aspects of data integration and cohesive AI application strategies.
The future requires bold strategies and high ambitions. The organizations that pursue an agenda rooted in data integration first will become the category leaders in the new AI race. At Avato, my colleagues and I are deeply committed to this vision, and we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with those ready to take this critical first step.