This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.
In this guest blog post, Eric Melcher, Chief Technology Officer at Profisee, examines the problems of siloed data and how the Profisee MDM platform integrated with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview can match, merge, and standardize raw data for AI enablement so you can extract meaningful insights about your business.
Everyone with access to Microsoft Copilot is a data analyst now. While that’s empowering and has amazing potential to speed time to insights and boost productivity, the advantages you stand to gain from artificial intelligence (AI) won’t come unless your data is ready for consumption.
The road to AI enablement
As any data leader worth their salt will tell you, AI enablement is not a simple plug-and-play. There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to ensure a company’s data is ready for the primetime of AI-derived insights and analytics. Enterprise data typically comes from a variety of different sources, with different people entering that data in different places and at different times for different reasons. For many companies, this siloed data is inconsistent, incomplete, duplicative at best, and unusable at worst.
Microsoft Fabric is a modern analytics platform with both integrated tools and storage. You can and should load data from source systems into Fabric to break down those data silos. So, does having all your data in one place solve the problem of siloed and inconsistent data? Loading data into Fabric improves data accessibility, but it does not address the inconsistency problem. This has more to do with logical or semantic integration and is more an issue of data usability. To address that, we need master data management (MDM).
Creating consumable data with master data management
MDM is key to getting your data to a state where it’s consumption-ready so you can start leveraging AI. Consider this example:
Let’s say your company has records for me, Eric Melcher, CTO at Profisee, in three different systems. The record in your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system shows my name as “Melcher, Eric.” In your customer relationship management (CRM) system it’s “Erik Melcher.” And in a legacy application it’s “E. Melcher.”
Do all three of these records refer to me, or do they refer to three different customers who happen to have similar names? If a human can’t be sure without doing some digging, how will an AI know that these records are, in fact, for the same person?
To further complicate things, each source system mentioned above holds this data in different data structures. In other words, the data is not ready for consumption.
This is where MDM fits into a data fabric architecture. With the Profisee MDM platform, you can match, merge, and standardize this raw data (bronze medallion data in data lakehouse terminology) and publish it as consumable data products (gold medallion data). This is what your business intelligence (BI) analysts need, and it’s what your AI-powered co-pilots need if they are to provide meaningful insights about your business.
Profisee is not only integrated with Microsoft Fabric to enable this data improvement, it’s also integrated with Microsoft Purview to ensure Profisee can implement and enforce any governance standards noted in Purview as part of this transformation. To learn more, check out our solution on Azure Marketplace: Master Data Management for Azure (SaaS).
Tying it all together
AI enablement is not a destination — it’s a journey. But embarking on this odyssey without proper preparation is like setting sail without a compass. Equip yourself with the right tools — Profisee MDM for master data management, Microsoft Purview for data governance, and Microsoft Fabric for a unified analytics platform — to navigate this exciting but complex landscape.
By harnessing the power of these platforms, you can make the most of the data you already have to enable both traditional BI and generative AI — and deliver insights at a scale and depth previously thought impossible.
Check out this four-minute video for a more visual description of how to drive AI-enablement at scale through Microsoft Fabric and Profisee MDM.