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The ability to deliver strategic use cases

Deliver strategic use cases that cannot realistically be done with other technologies.

Objective

The primary justification for building an Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) is simple: to deliver strategic use cases that cannot realistically be implemented with other technologies.

However, there is an important distinction between lighthouse use cases and strategic use cases:

  • Lighthouse use cases are the ultimate proof point that makes the case for EKG adoption, overcoming the enormous resistance to change that exists in large organizations. They are the use case that pulls everyone over the line—business stakeholders, technologists, security teams, and data professionals—convincing them that EKG is critically important to the organization.

  • Strategic use cases are other strategically important or mission-critical use cases that can be done better (or only) by EKG. These are important capabilities that matter at the C-level, but they may not be the initial lighthouse that breaks through organizational resistance.

The Enterprise Knowledge Graph Forum (EKGF) claims that only an EKG can realistically implement these strategic use cases at enterprise scale.

Lighthouse Use Cases: Making the Case for EKG

Large organizations have enormous, almost insurmountable resistance to change. They've been doing things the same way for decades, and few new paradigms are wholeheartedly embraced. Even when organizations adopt Agile or DevOps, it's often in the lightest possible way—basically just to "check the boxes."

EKG introduces many groundbreaking paradigms at once: semantic technology, knowledge graphs, self-describing datasets, model-driven development, and more. Convincing an organization and all its layers— business people, technologists, security professionals, data specialists—requires a compelling proof point.

A lighthouse use case is that proof point. It is the strategic use case that:

  • Demonstrates undeniable value that cannot be achieved with traditional approaches
  • Overcomes organizational resistance by showing clear, measurable results
  • Convinces all stakeholders across business, technology, security, and data domains
  • Justifies the investment in EKG as a strategic platform, not just a one-off project
  • Creates momentum for broader EKG adoption across the enterprise

The lighthouse use case is the one that makes everyone say: "We need EKG. This is the future of how we operate."

Strategic Use Cases: Mission-Critical Capabilities

Beyond the lighthouse use case, there are many other strategically important or mission-critical use cases that can be done better (or only) by EKG. These strategic use cases:

  • Deliver significant business value at the executive level
  • Solve problems that other technologies cannot realistically address
  • Create competitive advantage through unique capabilities
  • Enable long-term transformation rather than solving isolated problems
  • Build on the EKG foundation established by the lighthouse use case

Strategic use cases may not be the initial proof point, but they are essential capabilities that justify continued investment in EKG and demonstrate its value across multiple domains.

The GenAI Connection

A particularly relevant example today is GenAI guardrailing. As organizations explore generative AI, there's a nightmare scenario: letting GenAI agents loose on all legacy system endpoints using MCP servers and similar approaches without proper guardrails.

EKG provides the semantic foundation to guardrail GenAI, enabling:

  • Controlled access to enterprise data through semantic models
  • Governed interactions with systems and data sources
  • Meaningful context for AI agents through ontologies and relationships
  • Safe experimentation without risking critical systems
  • Auditable AI operations through the knowledge graph

Having GenAI guardrailed by EKG allows GenAI use cases to thrive safely and effectively, rather than creating chaos by connecting AI agents directly to legacy endpoints.

Why EKG Enables Unique Capabilities

Traditional technology stacks face fundamental limitations when addressing enterprise-wide strategic challenges:

The Limitations of Traditional Approaches

  • Siloed data — Information trapped in isolated systems cannot be easily connected or queried across domains
  • Rigid schemas — Relational databases require predefined structures that break when business needs evolve
  • Point-to-point integration — Connecting systems requires custom integrations for each connection, creating exponential complexity
  • Limited semantic understanding — Systems cannot understand relationships and meaning across different domains
  • High maintenance costs — Changes require extensive rework across multiple systems

How EKG Overcomes These Limitations

Enterprise Knowledge Graphs enable strategic use cases through:

  • Semantic connectivity — Data is connected by meaning, not just structure, enabling queries across any domain (see Interoperability)
  • Flexible schema — Ontologies can evolve without breaking existing queries or applications
  • Universal integration — One semantic layer connects all systems, reducing integration complexity (see Interoperability)
  • Relationship-first design — The graph structure naturally represents complex relationships and dependencies
  • Incremental evolution — New use cases can build on existing components without disrupting what's already working (see Avoid Disruption)

The Unique Power of Composable Components

When the Use Case Tree Method is followed completely, EKG enables a unique capability: the delivery of robust, heavily tested knowledge graph components that function like highly reusable lego bricks.

These components are:

  • Data as code — Knowledge graph components are versioned, testable, and deployable like software code
  • Low-code or no-code — Components can be composed into larger use cases with minimal custom development (see Composable Business)
  • Heavily tested — Each component has comprehensive test coverage, ensuring reliability and quality (see Increase Quality)
  • Highly reusable — Small, focused components can be combined to build larger, more complex capabilities (see Enable Reuse)
  • Composable — Components can be assembled like lego bricks to create enterprise-spanning solutions (see Composable Business and Modularity)

This composable architecture enables organizations to scale up drastically in terms of both functionality and quality. As more components are built and tested, the organization's capability to deliver complex use cases accelerates exponentially.

Examples of Lighthouse and Strategic Use Cases

Both lighthouse and strategic use cases typically appear at the top of the Use Case Tree and represent enterprise-wide capabilities. The same use case might serve as a lighthouse for one organization and a strategic use case for another, depending on organizational context and priorities.

Common examples include:

Client 360 / Customer 360

Create a unified, real-time view of every customer across all touchpoints, products, and interactions. Traditional approaches require massive data warehouses with complex ETL processes that are expensive, slow to update, and break when new data sources are added. EKG enables real-time, federated views that automatically connect customer data from any source through semantic relationships (see Interoperability).

Business Value: Improved customer experience, reduced churn, increased cross-selling, better personalization.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Enterprise Fraud Detection

Detect fraudulent patterns across all transactions, accounts, and channels in real-time, even when patterns span multiple systems and time periods. Fraud patterns often involve relationships between entities (people, accounts, transactions, locations) that are not visible in isolated systems. EKG's graph structure enables pattern detection across the entire enterprise data landscape.

Business Value: Reduced fraud losses, regulatory compliance, improved security posture.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Enterprise Risk & Compliance Management

Monitor and manage risk and compliance across all regulatory requirements, business units, and jurisdictions in real-time. Risk and compliance require understanding relationships between regulations, business processes, data lineage, and organizational structures. EKG provides the semantic foundation to model and query these complex relationships (see Capture Knowledge).

Business Value: Reduced regulatory fines, faster compliance reporting, proactive risk management.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Supply Chain Management

Optimize supply chains by understanding relationships between suppliers, products, logistics, and demand across the entire ecosystem. Supply chains involve complex, multi-level relationships that span organizations, geographies, and time. EKG enables real-time visibility and optimization across the entire supply network.

Business Value: Reduced costs, improved resilience, faster response to disruptions.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Data Privacy & Governance

Track and manage personal data across all systems, ensuring compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations. Privacy regulations require understanding data lineage, consent, sharing agreements, and cross-system relationships. EKG provides the semantic foundation to model and query these relationships automatically (see Capture Knowledge and Interoperability).

Business Value: Reduced regulatory fines, improved customer trust, automated compliance reporting.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Recommendation Engine / Interest Graph

Provide personalized recommendations by understanding relationships between users, content, products, and behaviors across the entire platform. Effective recommendations require understanding complex, multi-dimensional relationships that evolve over time. EKG's graph structure naturally represents these relationships and enables real-time recommendation generation.

Business Value: Increased engagement, higher conversion rates, improved user experience.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Enterprise-Spanning Regulatory Reports

Deliver extremely complex regulatory reports that require full data lineage and provenance discovery across all systems, complying with regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions. Traditional approaches cannot efficiently trace data lineage across siloed systems or provide complete provenance for every data point. EKG's composable component architecture enables organizations to build regulatory reporting capabilities from reusable, tested components.

Business Value: Reduced compliance risk, faster regulatory reporting, automated lineage tracking, reduced manual effort, ability to respond to new regulations quickly.

This use case particularly demonstrates the power of composable components—regulatory reporting capabilities can be built incrementally from reusable components, enabling rapid adaptation to changing regulatory requirements.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Digital Twin of Technology and Data Landscape

Build a complete, real-time representation of the entire technology and data landscape to enable visibility, impact analysis, optimization, and strategic planning. Traditional approaches cannot effectively model the complex, multi-dimensional relationships between systems, applications, data flows, business processes, and dependencies. EKG's composable component architecture enables organizations to build a digital twin by composing reusable components.

Business Value: Reduced technology costs, improved risk management, faster change impact analysis, better strategic planning, optimized resource allocation.

The ability to build such comprehensive capabilities from reusable, tested components is unique to EKG when following the Use Case Tree Method completely.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

Complex Construction Project Quotations

Create reliable, accurate quotations for complex construction projects that typically take years from ideation to delivery. The quotation process is extremely time-intensive, expensive, and involves significant risk, heavily relying on experienced specialists and subject matter experts (SMEs).

Complex construction projects depend on vast amounts of knowledge that resides in the heads of experienced specialists, plus enormous volumes of documentation (PDFs, diagrams, calculations). EKG captures structured knowledge from SMEs, while GenAI extracts knowledge from documents. EKG provides fact-checking guardrails to ensure GenAI generated content is validated against structured knowledge, ensuring reliability and accuracy.

Business Value: Dramatically reduced quotation time and cost, improved accuracy and reliability, reduced risk, preserved institutional knowledge, faster response to RFPs, competitive advantage through quicker turnaround.

This use case demonstrates how EKG and GenAI work together—EKG provides the structured, validated knowledge foundation, while GenAI accelerates knowledge extraction and generation, with EKG serving as the critical guardrail to ensure reliability.

Learn more on the EKG Catalog

The Competitive Advantage

Both lighthouse and strategic use cases enabled by EKG create sustainable competitive advantages because:

  1. They cannot be easily replicated — Competitors using traditional technology stacks cannot match the capabilities without similar investment
  2. They compound over time — Each new use case builds on previous ones, creating increasing returns
  3. They enable innovation — The semantic foundation enables rapid experimentation and new capability development
  4. They reduce technical debt — Unlike point solutions, EKG capabilities are reusable and composable
  5. They enable safe AI adoption — EKG provides the guardrails needed for GenAI and other AI technologies to thrive in enterprise contexts

How the Use Case Tree Method Enables Strategic Use Cases

The Use Case Tree Method provides the structure and discipline needed to deliver strategic use cases:

  • Strategic planning — The Use Case Tree helps identify and prioritize strategic use cases at the top level (see Align with Business Strategy)
  • Incremental delivery — Strategic use cases are broken down into smaller, deliverable components that can be built incrementally (see Avoid Boiling the Ocean and Avoid Disruption)
  • Reuse and composition — Lower-level use cases become reusable components that accelerate delivery of strategic capabilities (see Enable Reuse and Composable Business)
  • Business alignment — The method ensures strategic use cases are defined in business terms and aligned with business outcomes (see Know What the Business Wants and Bridge the Gap)
  • Risk management — Dependencies and relationships are visible in the tree, enabling better risk assessment and mitigation

Getting Started

To identify and deliver lighthouse and strategic use cases:

  1. Identify your lighthouse use case — What use case will overcome organizational resistance and make the case for EKG? This should be a compelling proof point that demonstrates clear, measurable value.

  2. Identify strategic use cases — What other strategically important or mission-critical use cases can be done better (or only) by EKG?

  3. Map to Use Case Tree — Position lighthouse and strategic use cases at the top of your Use Case Tree

  4. Break down into components — Decompose use cases into smaller, deliverable components

  5. Start with the lighthouse — Focus initial effort on the lighthouse use case to build momentum and overcome resistance

  6. Build foundational components — Create reusable components that support both lighthouse and strategic use cases

  7. Measure business outcomes — Track how use cases deliver on business objectives, especially for the lighthouse use case

Related Content

Concepts

  • Use Case Tree - The structure that organizes strategic use cases
  • EKG - The platform that enables strategic use cases

Process

Author: Jacobus Geluk