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Use Case Tree Method
K: Deliver Strategic Use Cases - Unique Business Capabilities
EKGF/ekg-method

The ability to deliver strategic use cases

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

Why build an Enterprise Knowledge Graph? Simple: to deliver strategic use cases that cannot realistically be done with other technologies.

Not "could be done slightly better." Cannot be done. Period.

Two types of use cases matter here:

  • Lighthouse use cases - The proof point that breaks through organizational resistance. The one that makes skeptics believers. Without a lighthouse, you'll spend years in pilot purgatory.

  • Strategic use cases - Mission-critical capabilities that matter at the C-level. They may not be your first win, but they're why you're building an EKG in the first place.

The EKGF claims that only an EKG can realistically implement these strategic use cases at enterprise scale. Bold claim. But look at the evidence.

Lighthouse Use Cases: Breaking Through Resistance

Large organizations resist change. They've been doing things the same way for decades. Even when they adopt Agile or DevOps, it's usually box-ticking theater.

EKG introduces multiple paradigms at once: semantic technology, knowledge graphs, self-describing datasets, model-driven development. That's a lot to swallow. Convincing business people, technologists, security teams, and data specialists all at once requires a proof point that's impossible to ignore.

That's your lighthouse use case. The one that makes everyone say: "We need this. Now."

A good lighthouse:

  • Demonstrates value that traditional approaches simply cannot deliver
  • Shows clear, measurable results that silence the skeptics
  • Justifies EKG as a strategic platform, not just another pilot
  • Creates momentum for broader adoption

Strategic Use Cases: The Real Prize

Beyond the lighthouse are the strategic use cases—the reason you're building an EKG in the first place. These are capabilities that:

  • Matter at the C-level
  • Cannot be done with traditional technology (not "could be better"—cannot)
  • Create competitive advantage that compounds over time
  • Build on each other through the EKG foundation

The GenAI Connection

Here's a timely example: GenAI guardrailing.

Organizations are rushing to deploy GenAI agents. The nightmare scenario? Letting those agents loose on legacy system endpoints via MCP servers with no guardrails. Direct access to production data. No semantic understanding. No governance. Chaos waiting to happen.

EKG provides the semantic foundation to make GenAI safe:

  • Controlled, governed access to enterprise data
  • Meaningful context through ontologies and relationships
  • Auditable operations through the knowledge graph
  • Safe experimentation without risking critical systems

Without EKG, GenAI is a liability. With EKG, it's a competitive weapon.

Why Traditional Technology Can't Do This

Traditional stacks hit fundamental walls:

  • Siloed data — Information trapped in systems that don't talk to each other
  • Rigid schemas — Relational databases break when business needs evolve
  • Point-to-point integration — Every new connection multiplies complexity exponentially
  • No semantic understanding — Systems don't understand meaning, just structure
  • Change is expensive — Every modification ripples across systems

How EKG Changes the Game

  • Semantic connectivity — Data connected by meaning, queryable across any domain (see Interoperability)
  • Flexible schema — Ontologies evolve without breaking existing applications
  • Universal integration — One semantic layer connects everything
  • Relationships first — The graph structure naturally represents complex dependencies
  • Incremental evolution — New use cases build on existing components without disruption (see Avoid Disruption)

Composable Components: The Multiplier

When the Use Case Tree Method is followed properly, something powerful happens: you build reusable lego bricks instead of one-off solutions.

These components are:

  • Data as code — Versioned, testable, deployable
  • Low-code composable — Snap together with minimal custom development (see Composable Business)
  • Heavily tested — Comprehensive coverage, guaranteed reliability (see Increase Quality)
  • Highly reusable — Build once, use everywhere (see Enable Reuse)

The result? Each use case you deliver makes the next one faster. Your capability to build complex solutions accelerates exponentially.

Examples: What Does "Cannot Be Done" Look Like?

These sit at the top of your Use Case Tree. What's a lighthouse for one organization might be a strategic use case for another—context matters. But they all share one thing: traditional technology can't deliver them at enterprise scale.

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 Moat

These capabilities create advantages that compound:

  1. Cannot be replicated easily — Competitors on traditional stacks can't match you without similar investment
  2. Compound over time — Each use case makes the next one faster
  3. Enable innovation — The semantic foundation lets you experiment rapidly
  4. Reduce technical debt — Reusable components instead of point solutions
  5. Make AI safe — EKG provides the guardrails for GenAI to thrive

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