Have you seen real estate listings that describe a house as architect-designed? It adds a lot to the asking price, but aren’t all houses designed by architects? Most are, but they’re then rather generically churned out by a construction company. If your house counts as architecture, though, someone designed it for specific needs and tastes. In the same way, your organization stands to benefit when your data architecture is put together based on your particular data management and analytics needs. But often, we inherit many of the generic components and integrations from the product designs of our technology vendors. If we’ve customized some of the structure of data architecture, that may have happened ad hoc, over a long time. Within a successful data architecture, a conceptual design based on the business process is the most crucial ingredient, followed by a logical design that emphasizes consistency, integrity, and efficiency across all the databases and data pipelines. Once the data architecture is established, the organization can see what data resides where and ensure that the data is secured, stored efficiently, and processed accurately. Also, when one database or a component is changed, the data architecture can allow the organization to assess the impact quickly and guides all relevant teams on the designs and implementations. Lastly, the data architecture is a live document of the enterprise systems, which is guaranteed to be up-to-date and gives a clear end-to-end picture. In summary, a holistic data architecture that reflects the end-to-end business process and operations is essential for a company to advance quickly and efficiently while undergoing significant changes such as acquisitions, digital transformation, or migration to the next-gen platform.