CxO Insights – Ruwan Hewawitharana

“As AI scales, data governance isn’t just about control, it’s about enabling innovation through trust, transparency, and disciplined architecture.”

Ruwan Hewawitharana: As AI initiatives scale, data governance becomes mission critical. Businesses must ensure that data is accurate, secure, and ethically managed. This means investing in metadata management, data lineage, and compliance frameworks that support transparency and trust. Fortude helps clients build governance models that are not just protective but enabling, allowing innovation to flourish within a secure and compliant environment. This comes by design, and we at Fortude follow the principle of “discipline at the core and flexibility at the edge” when supporting our clients with data analytics initiatives.

“By building a unified, enterprise-scale data ecosystem, we enabled one of Australia’s largest furniture retailers to eliminate silos, empower self-service analytics, and scale AI across the business.”

Ruwan Hewawitharana: One of our standout success stories is a leading Australian Furniture retailer, with a nationwide footprint.

Our client faced significant challenges with fragmented reporting systems, inconsistent data sources, and a lack of governance across tools. These issues created bottlenecks in generating timely and accurate business insights, limiting their ability to scale and respond quickly.

Fortude partnered with them to design and implement a future-ready, enterprise-scale data ecosystem. We delivered a lakehouse-based data platform and an enterprise data warehouse on Microsoft Fabric, enabling unified, governed reporting with near real-time capabilities. This transformation empowered business users with secure, self-service analytics, reduced reliance on IT for insights, and eliminated data silos.

The outcomes also included improved business agility through consistent and governed reporting, scalable infrastructure on Azure to support cloud-native growth, master data consolidation using Infor M3 ERP, and a strategic roadmap to support long-term data maturity.

This initiative was so impactful that it contributed to Fortude winning the Digital Transformation Award for APAC by AICPA & CIMA in 2024, with the solution proposed for this company featured as a key case study.

We’re now expanding the solution to support analytics across finance and supply chain, and integrating intelligent automation using advanced AI technologies.

“Our growth in ANZ is about more than scale; it’s about impact. With a strong team and proven practices, we’re helping clients reimagine operations through intelligent, human-centric transformation.”

Ruwan Hewawitharana: What excites me most is our ability to bring together highly experienced and qualified Data Architects, Fabric Analytics Engineers, and AI Specialists, applying proven best practices to deliver unified data platform solutions. Our presence in ANZ is growing not just in scale, but in impact. With a strong team, we are helping clients reimagine their operations, from supply chain to sustainability, through intelligent, human-centric transformation.