Business people sitting in a futuristic meeting room where a business woman presents data graphs on a whiteboard

White paper Data & AI

Data Must Flow: The Enterprise Data Marketplace as the Key to Scalable Data Value Creation

White paper: Data Must Flow

White paper Contents at a Glance

  • Why data must flow: the paradox of growing data volumes and decisions still made on intuition
  • The anatomy of data stagnation: five mutually reinforcing symptoms, from undiscoverable to not governed at scale
  • The Enterprise Data Marketplace as a structural answer incl. self-service access, data products, data sharing, monetization
  • The foundations: how Data Mesh, data products, and the FAIR principles work together
  • The operating model: roles, federated governance, and measurement through leading and lagging KPIs
  • Implications for analytics and AI: why conversational analytics and agentic workflows depend on this data foundation

Data: the most discussed, least mobilized asset in the enterprise

Companies own more data than ever, yet a growing share of decisions is made on gut feel, because the data never reaches the people who need it. More than half of all enterprise data is never analyzed, while the volume of unstructured data alone is set to exceed 10 zettabytes by 2028. This is more of an allocation problem than a storage problem.


In this white paper, Dr. Sven-Erik Willrich and Dirk Walther explain why neither another data warehouse nor another governance committee is the answer, but the Enterprise Data Marketplace as an operating layer between data producers and consumers. Grounded in Data Mesh, data product thinking, and the FAIR principles, you get a clear operating model and learn why this foundation is a prerequisite for the next wave of analytics and AI.

Our experts

Dr. Sven-Erik Willrich

Dr. Sven-Erik Willrich - Senior Manager, Data Strategy & AI

With a doctorate in Business Informatics from KIT and more than ten years of consulting experience at the intersection of technology and strategy, Dr. Sven-Erik Willrich enables organizations to shape enterprise-wide data strategy end to end. The focus areas of his extensive experience are data strategy, data governance, and master data management, as well as GenAI strategy, complemented by a lectureship in Data Management at HTW Berlin and several books, including the Springer publication “Data-Driven Company.”

Dirk Walther

Dirk Walther - Manager, Enterprise Data Architecture

With a degree in Business Informatics from TU Dresden and extensive cross-industry project experience, Dirk Walther enables organizations to optimize data architectures and build AI initiatives on quality-assured data. The focus areas of his extensive experience are data infrastructure optimization, data quality and governance, and ETL and data migration.

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Download the white paper and learn directly how an Enterprise Data Marketplace turns your data from a hidden by-product into a curated, reusable asset.

Curious to learn more?

Discover why the reliability of agentic AI workflows depends on your data foundation, and how a focused lighthouse project delivers a business case in a quarter rather than a year.

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