One can aptly describe many of today’s organizations as complex adaptive systems. Dynamic interaction patterns and emergent relationships characterize their complexity, while their ability to change and self-organize capture their adaptiveness. To survive, traditional mechanistic, highly structured organizations characterized by rigid, vertical communications have transformed to organic, rapidly changing organizations that exhibit nearly amorphous communication patterns. Organizations that learn to adapt usually survive or even thrive; conversely, those that don’t adapt, either dissolve or become insignificant.
Technology supporting complex adaptive organizations must also be adaptive, so that organizations can effectively and rapidly acclimate to changes in their environments. One of the aspects of adaptiveness is coping with unforeseen changes. Anzo Smart Data Lake® (ASDL) is built on standards-based technologies that embrace change. For example, our underlying graph data model maximizes flexibility, which supports application changes. Another important aspect ASDL supports is ad hoc questions. In a rapidly changing world, one cannot know the questions needed to ask from day to day, much less the answers. ASDL’s data model frees applications from predefined questions, and hard-wired data schemas. ASDL is model-driven, and the model is maximally flexible, which results in a highly adaptive capability for dynamic organizations.
Additionally, the characteristics of ASDL extend the reach of adaptability to niche applications. Users or developers can build custom analytic applications rapidly and economically for just a small number of – or just one - users. ASDL enables self-service application development and analytics. This capability also facilitates an organizational goal to “align information technology with business” and serve the “long tail of IT”. In each of these concepts, a large number of applications can be developed for a small number of users – something that heretofore just didn’t happen due to time and expense.
Mainstream energy is concentrated at the user layer, and less attention is given to the data architecture that powers these capabilities. However, the same rapid assembly, adaptability and composition at the user experience layer are necessary all the way down to the infrastructure and hardware layers. Accordingly, in addition to ASDL’s flexible data model, we provide elastic, on demand, deployments. This means enterprises expand or retire the capacity of ASDL based on requirements, budget and other factors.
In summary, contemporary organizations exhibit characteristics of complex adaptive systems. To survive and thrive, information technology supporting these organizations must be adaptive. Anzo Smart Data Lake employs a flexible data architecture and elastic deployment model that delivers the necessary adaptability.
To learn more about the Anzo Smart Data Lake, download our whitepaper here.
