DATA MANAGEMENT
The Enrichment Game: A Story About Making Data More Powerful From the Uber app that manages your transportation to the social media application that allows you to stay in touch with your distant friends and family, it’s clear that software applications run the world. Each of these applications is continuously generating data. To win the enrichment game, organizations must take that data and do something useful with it. Organizations must understand how all this complex data can work together to answer questions, do research, provide insight, forecast the future, and recommend new ways of doing business. To do this successfully, data from one application needs to be enriched with data from other applications.
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Those who can do this successfully can show data in ways that are unexpected and surprising. The enrichment game has two goals. The first is to demonstrate the value of the data our organizations spend so much money to gather, protect, and in some cases, share. The second is to enrich the data available to a business by showing more context about the meaning of the data.
Data strategists, data architects, data scientists, business analysts, and business intelligence designers all play the game. Chief data officers oversee it, and the winner or loser of the game is the business itself. To understand the enrichment game, we need to know how data specialists differ from software developers in their approach to data.