CGIAR Big Data Convention 2017

Imagine for a moment you are President of Avianca Airlines.  You probably do not spend much of your time thinking about specific data technologies--yet you know full well, say, that there is a system for frequent fliers that must interoperate with the baggage and check-in systems if your firm is to be fully effective as an airline.  

The purpose of information architecture is to enable execution against the strategy of the enterprise.  We must be able to understand it as a practical vision and in functional terms without having to be an engineer or a system architect to discuss it.     Our panelists represent significant bioinformatics platforms, global approaches to computing and storage infrastructure, and data science--and we are going to ask them in some sense to not talk about technology.  Instead are going to ask them to talk about functions and capabilities that we want to build, how these can reinforce each other in a functional vision for global, multi-stakeholder, public-good digital infrastructure that would enable and support the strategies of CGIAR centers and their partners, the CGIAR network, and the sector  as a whole. 

How can we accommodate an array of languages, stakeholders, infrastructure environments and legal regimes?  What key capabilities or business functions should an architecture support?  What might be common, collaborative, or federated approaches to data architecture and systems that can help the CGIAR and public, private and non-profit partners fulfill their missions?  What kinds of infrastructure, data sets, services or skills must be invested in in light of these needs?