The mandate to build a trusted data foundation for unified commerce

Observations from the NRF Big Show

After a couple of challenging years due to the pandemic, National Retail Federation’s Big Show came back in full swing to the Javits Convention Center in New York City as an in-person event in January. Orion Governance participated in this retail industry’s most influential event as a sponsor, and we got a chance to feel the pulse of the retail world.

By interacting with retail customers and partners, we learned that in their pursuit of a unified commerce strategy, retailers first need to build a unified data governance regime. And a prerequisite to this unified governance regime is a unified and centralized view of the data flow from complex, disparate, and often siloed data systems.

EIIG Helps Retailers Navigate Data Pipelines

This is where Orion’s Enterprise Information Intelligence Graph (EIIG) can make a critical difference. As retailers are keenly aware, the amount of data is increasing at an exponential rate. Data is everywhere, being created, stored, transformed, and used. Since retailers have adopted various and complex technologies in their supply chain data environment, and data is siloed, it is hard for them to see and trace data movement and establish the single source of truth.

Modernization efforts such as migration to cloud have compounded the challenge. Without a comprehensive understanding of their legacy data landscape as well as supporting the new cloud-based technologies in a hybrid cloud environment, migration readiness assessment and the actual implementation become problematic. As a result, many cloud-migration projects have failed.

Supporting New and Legacy Technologies

Orion’s EIIG enables retailers to build a self-defined data fabric using a bottom-up approach. By ingesting metadata from a wide range of technologies, including Python, Java, Scala, SAS, ETL and reporting tools, to AS/400 and the mainframe, EIIG visualizes end-to-end data movement through the retailer’s supply chain data landscape in a centralized and unified knowledge graph. By doing so, retailers can achieve both intra- and inter-system connectivity. In other words, EIIG breaks down the data silos and makes the invisible visible.

See Proof of Benefits Across Teams

With this end-to-end traceability and near real-time data observability, EIIG allows retailers and other stakeholders such as suppliers, partners, and customers to find the single source of truth on which to collaborate. Other capabilities such as data lineage, data catalog, active metadata, continuous quality monitoring, trust propagation, identification of duplicate data assets, and real-time impact analysis can further enable retailers to quickly isolate root causes of issues, comply with regulations, and accelerate their modernization projects. AI/ML-powered automation also helps retailers save cost, accelerate time to value, and maximize profits.

Download our white paper here to learn how to intelligently navigate retail unified commerce supply chain data landscape here.

Please contact us to find out more about how Orion Governance can help retailers build a discoverable, trusted, and reusable data governance platform to enhance their unified commerce initiative.

About the Author: Niu Bai, Ph.D. is the Head of Global Business Development at Orion Governance, Inc. Connect with Niu on LinkedIn.