Intelligent Platform: What it is and how to integrate it into your organization

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Extracting value from data has become an essential process in all organizations. Professionals need to deep dive  into information from different business departments and leverage cutting-edge technologies to find synergy points between data that will lead to relevant insights. However, the way to extract value from data is evolving due to rapidly changing markets and operational needs. Current processes are becoming obsolete.

In addition, technical capabilities tend to be concentrated in a few individuals or teams across the organization. This leads to bottlenecks and a focus on data-driven use cases that are often not aligned with the business’s needs. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems without a detailed use case is a good example. In this scenario, an Intelligent Platform is needed.

The role of the Intelligent Platform

NTT DATA’s proprietary Intelligent Platform solution automates all administrative tasks in the data value chain, encourages experimentation, democratizes innovation and strategic prototyping, increases efficiency, reduces time to market and supports the final decision-making process with AI/Machine Learning (ML) assistance.

This approach addresses customer needs by providing consulting, guidance, methodologies, blueprints, frameworks, operations management, and organizational formulas to help build an Intelligence Driven Organization (IDO).

In a complex business environment where it is difficult to deliver value to users while reducing internal costs, C-level executives such as Chief Data Officers (CDOs), Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Architectural Officers (CAOs) need solutions that can leverage the value of data and cloud platforms.

CDOs often encounter difficulties related to access to information, low maturity in analytics capabilities and lack of data quality. CIOs struggle to balance expanding platform capabilities while controlling the costs of initiatives. Meanwhile, CAOs must address the challenges posed by CDOs.

These pitfalls reflect a common problem within IT organizations, as they must define data governance initiatives, change methodologies, ensure data provenance and quality tracking, and build skilled, expert and accountable teams.

In other words, C-level executives and managers are demanding a paradigm shift, calling for a quantum leap in how data systems, processes and methodologies are conceived to unravel their complexity and enable a horizon of new opportunities.

Coping with trends

In addition to these business needs, CDOs, CIOs and CAOs face emerging trends in the marketplace. As a result, they must keep up with technology developments that impact on their organization to generate new business value.

Key trends include the adoption of disruptive elements such as Data Mesh, Data Fabric, Data Virtualization, Hyper-automation, Data Products or Data Marketplaces, which help reduce time to market for use cases.

NTT DATA’s Intelligent Platform is a highly customizable, cloud vendor-neutral, state-of-the-art data platform equipped with the latest AI capabilities. It is designed to empower data intelligence-driven organizations and apply best practices to manage data and AI models with outstanding security principles.

Intelligent Platform Possibilities

The NTT DATA Good Architecture solution includes reliability, security, operational excellence, performance efficiency and cost optimization. In addition, it is powered by artificial intelligence that is secure, resilient, reusable, and supports the incorporation of a data ecosystem that allows businesses to:

  • Enable the development of intelligent data products at scale.
  • Allowself-service to all stakeholders in the organization, such as business analysts, data scientists, data engineers or even C-level executives.
  • Foster the creation of new business models and data-driven solutions.
  • Create a data-centric corporate culture.
  • Increasing the value of data.
  • Lead the democratization of data.

The creation of Intelligent Platform is the result of years of innovation and cutting-edge developments. From its conception to its implementation, different features must be taken into account. On this basis, scalability and modularity have been pursued in the Platform’s core design.

These principles are fundamental to any Intelligent Platform and are achieved through Infrastructure-as-Code, Configuration-as-Code and Operations-as-Code practices, driven by policy, observability, encryption and artificial intelligence, in alignment with DevOps, FinOps, DataOps, MLOps and AIOps practices.

This allows the Intelligent Platform to adapt to the needs and objectives of the organization. For example, if the executive layer wants to develop different services and infrastructure, NTT DATA’s Intelligent Platform can be tailored to support cloud products, on-premises or edge or fog computing processes. It can also help in integrating multi-cloud environments or integrating multiple Intelligent Platforms into one.

The incremental maturity framework

The Intelligent Platform is the result of a four-stage incremental maturity framework based on real market experience. Each stage presents key features that become the basis for the next stage, ensuring a robust, governable and scalable platform without structural, technological or organizational gaps.

  1. The first stage, called “The Foundations” focuses on establishing a solid foundation for the Intelligent Platform. It assesses the organization’s readiness for the transition to the cloud and creates a landing structure that includes aspects of identity management, networking, storage and security.
  2. The second stage, called “Core Platform” focuses on the selection of business-relevant use cases and the formation of agile multidisciplinary teams. Reference projects and applications are developed that serve as MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
  3. The third stage, called “Business Platform” involves the industrialization of capabilities and services in the organization. The use cases implemented in the previous stages are refined and converted into data products. A marketplace is established and DataOps and MLOps frameworks are implemented.
  4. The fourth stage, called “Intelligent Platform” is the highest maturity stage. In this stage. The organization leverages a wide range of small platforms to develop and scale solutions across the organization.

Key Benefits

NTT DATA’s Intelligent Platform offers several key benefits, including:

  • Analytics potential to meet all organizational needs.
    The Intelligent Platform is instilled with AI, ensuring secure and governed access to data. It makes data secure and easy to use by hiding technical and functional complexities from the user. It includes features such as anonymous services, role management, workspace management, secure component integration and various tools and APIs to meet the organization’s analytical needs at all levels.
  • Scaling Up with data democratization, self-service excellence and a distributed architecture.
    Hyperautomation within the Platform and the use of marketplaces fosters data democratization and meets growing business demand. The adoption of Data Mesh architectures enables the creation of decentralized and functionally segmented platforms within a controlled environment, further improving scalability and time to market, and ensuring a high level of self-service and industrialization, which is crucial for expansion.
  • Ensuring business success, secure, reliable and easy access to information. The Intelligent Platform aims to deliver business value by ensuring secure, reliable and complete access to information with a full suite of analytics capabilities, including cutting-edge AI capabilities. In addition, the solution simplifies the user experience, allowing them to focus on driving organizational growth and innovation through new ideas.
  • Revolutionizing business efficiency, the power of integrated and automated technology
    The solution provides new capabilities and strengths by leveraging an integrated, modular and automated technology environment, which generates greater cost efficiency and resource optimization, avoiding vendor lock-in, eliminating the technology stack, roadmap collection, and licensing models of a single vendor.