Amgen: Data Centric Architecture
Amgen is a large biotechnology company committed to unlocking the potential of biology for patients suffering from serious illnesses by discovering, developing, manufacturing, and delivering innovative human therapeutics. Amgen, CEO Bob Bradway focuses on innovation to set the cultural direction. According to Bradway: “Push the boundaries of biotechnology and knowledge to be part of the process of changing the practice of medicine.”
Amgen’s goal is to provide life-changing value to patients with expediency. Democratized access to enterprise data speeds the process from drug discovery to drug delivery. One element Amgen’s strategic data leadership agreed upon is that a common language expedites product development by removing ambiguities that slow business processes.
Data capture comes from a multitude of information systems, each using their own data model and unique vocabularies. Different systems use different terminology to refer to the same concept. An organization steeped in data silos no longer works. The challenge is to provide a common intuitive model for all systems and people to use. Once such a model is in place, it is no longer laborious and expensive for enterprise consumers to benefit from the data. A decision to establish a semantic layer for building an enterprise data fabric emerged.
Amgen developed a vision of a Data-Centric Architecture (DCA) that transforms data from being system-specific to being universally available. Data is organized and unambiguously represented in data domains within a Semantic layer.
