| | FEBRUARY 20178CIOReviewThinking About ERP in an Ever-Changing World of DataBy Anthony J. Scriffignano, SVP/Chief Data Scientist, Dun & Bradstreet Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was born of a promise to provide a common, enterprise view of data and process across an organization. Of course, such a vision is bold and never completely achieved, but many industries have seen otherwise unimaginable benefit from uniting organizations around a solid ERP strategy. Nevertheless, we would be wise not to get too comfortable. With all of the changes the world has seen in data including big data, cloud computing, IoT and other connected devices, data privacy regulation, cybersecurity concerns and many other phenomena that didn't even have words to describe them only a few short years ago, shouldn't we wonder how all of this change might impact our ERP-enabled organizations?The Foundations: StructureERP is largely about structuring data and connecting it according to strict standards. Studies have shown that getting the data right is among the top areas of focus that CIOs and other leaders in ERP implementations would have emphasized even more if given the chance. After all, an ERP is not simply a massive database connected with related applications. It is a complex network of data and transactions, which employs internal validations, audits, alerts, and other modalities to keep everything running smoothly.All of this reliance on structure makes it hard to ignore how the very nature of data is changing. Experts generally estimate that, while the amount of data on Earth is growing at an unprecedented (and arguably unmeasurable) rate, most of the new data is "unstructured," which is often a misnomer for data that has not been organized into a useful ontology. This data is constantly growing and rich in semantic context (such as online review comments, user stories, narratives, and many other forms of text). Some estimates put the amount of unstructured data creation at nearly 85 percent of all new data.At the same time, the nature of "new data" is also changing drastically, as IoT continues to grow. Devices are producing an ever-increasing mass of highly structured, but widely varied data. Much of this data is used in very limited ways, to drive specific processes or in a highly constrained domain. As devices begin to develop the ability to discover and interrogate one another, the ubiquity of IoT data will increase dramatically (as will the opportunity cost of ignoring this rich source of data for other purposes such as signal analysis, deep learning, and other very valuable In MyopinionAnthony J. Scriffignano
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