Life After the Lighthouse
After successfully navigating the lighthouse project, the pathway to progress should focus on the development of the team of involved stakeholders. The first hurdle is to expand the identity of data owners who know the location and health of the data. Much of this is about organizational dynamics and understanding who the players are, who is trusted, who is feared, who elicits cooperation, and who is out to kill the activity.
This coincides with the development of an action plan and the assembly of the team of skilled practitioners needed to ensure success. Enterprises will need an experienced architect who understands the workings of semantic technologies and knowledge graphs to lead the team. The CoE will need ontologists to engineer content and manage the mapping of data. Knowledge graph engineers are required to coordinate the meaning of data, knowledge, and content models. It also requires a project manager to be an advocate for the team and the development process.
Organizations working on their AI readiness must take into consideration all key aspects of the CoE and be ready from the perspective of people, technology, and data. The AI-ready data component means incorporating context with the data. Gartner points this out by placing knowledge graph at the center of their emerging radar for AI—and noting that it necessitates a shift from the traditional ETL mindset to a new ECL (extract, contextualize, and load) orientation. To ensure meaningful data connections even further, Gartner advises enterprises to leverage semantic metadata as the core for facilitating data connections.
The Graph CoE is an important step in transforming a lighthouse project or silo deployment into a true enterprise platform. A well-structured CoE should be viewed as a driver of innovation and agility within the enterprise that facilitates better data integration, improves operational efficiency, contextualizes AI, and enhances the user experience. It is the catalyst for building organizational capabilities for long-term strategic advantage and is one of the key steps in achieving a successful digital transformation journey.