By Alex Dowdalls and Arie Hakemulder<\/em><\/p>\n Many traditional organisations are currently toiling on Master Data Management (MDM) or Data Lake projects with seemingly no end in sight. Managers believe that they firstly need a data lake before they can create value with data.\u00a0 This results in a project aiming to copy data into a central repository and then maintain its accuracy and completeness. These projects often struggle to achieve data completeness and quality, let alone ensuring lineage and privacy.\u00a0 The specialists and management teams dealing with this topic are like the figures endlessly walking upstairs in the highlighted Escher painting.\u00a0 That is soul destroying.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s acknowledge that managing data is a complex task made even more complex if you inherit a legacy starting point as is the case with most traditional businesses.\u00a0 Data was never really a topic on the management agenda, data management has not really been understood and therefore left to the IT department or chief privacy officer.\u00a0 The technology to manage data has traditionally been the database with cloud and other variants encouraging large volumes of data to be copied and stored at low cost without creating value with the data<\/em>.<\/p>\n The next complication is time.\u00a0 When we discuss becoming \u201cdata driven\u201d with executives today, we often hear that this is the goal but that the company must firstly spend the next year or so trying to get its data organised, for example in a data lake.\u00a0 This is not how Big Tech, Unicorns and startups approach this issue.<\/p>\n The answer is to use \u201cLinked Data\u201d combined with FAIR Principles as an alternative approach to a data lake.\u00a0 You are already using this when you use Microsoft, Facebook, Google and many related apps.\u00a0 Many other companies and governments have already scaled this concept to an enterprise data strategy.<\/p>\n How does this work?<\/p>\n The idea, put simply, is to keep data at the source and manage its use within applications in such a way that both man and machine<\/em> can use the data. The key change is to use meta data in combination with globally unique identifiers with your data. The process of managing data becomes automated \u2013 you cannot do this with a manual data management approach!\u00a0 The figures trudging endlessly up the staircase stop trudging and get to do meaningful work creating value with the data instead.<\/p>\n To achieve this, an organisation must reconsider the traditional approach to a data lake and look at the concepts of FAIR Data Principles and Linked Data Technology.\u00a0 The FAIR data principles describe how data can be made:<\/p>\nHow can you create value with data without<\/u> building a data lake?<\/em><\/h3>\n