Identify your business objectives
Before you begin implementing Cognite Data Fusion (CDF), make sure that you have a good understanding of your organization's current IT architecture and how CDF will fit in.
Your executive sponsor and Cognite representative can provide valuable insight into how your project fits with the organization's high-level strategy for CDF. Aligning with your enterprise architect will also help you align your project with the organization's overall digital strategy.
Identify and prioritize your business objectives
CDF and Cognite applications have the potential to solve a broad range of business problems. We recommend that you set both your short-term and long-term objectives for CDF. Define your vision, identify the operational pain points you want to address, recognize and prioritize your use cases and data needs, and define measurements to determine if you're reaching your objectives.
Our recommended strategy to identify and prioritize your business objectives is that you start by focusing on a distinct type of asset/equipment or a process/manufacturing plant to limit your first implementation scope. This approach helps you learn and test your hypotheses faster.
Industry experts from Cognite or one of our partners are available to help you identify pain points and design data-driven solutions for your business. We have vast experience in data science and application development across different industries and digital themes, and we're excited to help you meet your business needs.
Finding the answers to the initial questions in the table below can help your team get off to a great start. Reach out to your Cognite representative to discuss and analyze the results of your investigations.
| Key questions | Insight |
|---|---|
| What are your existing high-level cloud and on-premises solutions? What are your critical IT and OT systems? Do you have data warehouses or other aggregation systems in place? | Your organization's Enterprise Architect can provide valuable insight into existing solutions and how CDF will impact the broader IT strategy. |
| What are your critical business applications (and users)? | Discovering digital business needs across your organization, and determining who your solutions will benefit can help scope your project plans. |
| Do you have any security principles or documentation requirements, e.g. for cloud solutions? | Confirming your organization’s best practices for security can help ensure your project upholds any existing standards. |
Do you have any existing integration principles or guidelines, e.g.
| Your organization’s system integrators, or Enterprise Architect can provide guidelines on ingesting your company’s data. |
Lock scope and define success
Common factors that can drive the project timeline and complexity include:
- The expertise and experience available within your organization. For example, knowledge about how to access live data sources and developing integrations.
- The internal approval process for getting access to data.
- The complexity of the source systems and mapping their data model to CDF.
- The complexity of the business problems you want to solve.
Define your success metrics and validation approach
As part of your planning process, we also recommend defining success metrics for your CDF implementation.
CDF’s core purpose is to enable and scale solutions for your business. You probably have both direct and indirect CDF users. For example, solution builders work directly with CDF, while business users interact with the solutions and applications you develop on top of CDF data. You should validate and define success metrics for both user groups.
The questions below can help you get started, and your Cognite representative can support you in refining the metrics.
Usage of CDF
- Who are my direct and indirect users of CDF?
- How many direct and indirect recurring users do I have?
- How do my users interact with CDF and the data it stores?
- How are my applications and solutions used?
User feedback
- Is the training helping you make the most out of CDF and the solutions you develop?
- Have you become more efficient at performing your tasks?
Business performance
- How do CDF and the solutions impact cost, revenue, and quality?
- Can you see the effect of the solutions on operational efficiency or direct financial performance?