Turning Data to Business Value through Democratization - Part 2 of 3

Technologies for Extracting Data Value

There are certain foundational positions or capabilities that have emerged as important to extracting the full business value of data. Chief among them are cloud services that allow organizations to deliver new capabilities with their existing skill sets, automated data encryption and security, data access across systems and locations, and real-time analytics capabilities.

For leaders, the fastest growing area in terms of investment is to be as real time as possible. This need for speed is a reaction to faster business cycles and the drive toward faster decision cycles. It’s important to have data as quickly as possible, even more so as uncertainty has increased and "real time" is where more companies need to invest.

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, silos remain a number one issue and individual departments may have multiple different applications and cloud environments. Very few companies have eliminated silos. The most desired capabilities that leaders seek include the ability to access data across IT systems & environments, data encryption & security automation, real-time analytics capabilities, and cloud services that don’t require entirely new skill sets to manage. 

A Foundation in the Cloud

As organizations seek to expand their adoption of these capabilities and overcome challenges, multi-cloud strategies continue to gain steam. A number of business drivers are fueling multi-cloud adoption rates such as greater operational efficiency, performance optimization, cost optimization, increased agility, risk mitigation, and access to best of breed solutions.

There continue to be a number of hurdles to greater multi-cloud usage for some organizations, however, including security concerns, lack of necessary skills, interoperability and integration concerns, issues related to legacy systems, and resistance to change in the business and investments already made in existing infrastructure and applications.

A TOOLKIT FOR TRANSFORMING DATA INTO VALUE

In spite of the challenges, companies that want to transform their business with data have no choice but to invest in the cloud as there are a number of benefits you could never afford on your own and if you’re investing in AI and machine learning in the enterprise, that’s where AI acceleration lives.

Diversifying among a number of public cloud vendors is about accessing not only best of breed solutions but best of need capabilities. Leaders look for the best tools for the data jobs at hand whether they are dealing with IoT data or a simple relational database. Each unique solution demands different data storage and processing, which tends to lead to fragmentation. Face it, you’re always going to have a heterogeneous environment.

Managing the mixed cloud environment can test organizations on a number of fronts including a lack of necessary skills, the difficulty of service integration and management, data governance and management issues, the challenges of performing analytics across a diverse IT environment, and lack of standardization for cloud management and configuration.

What leaders seek is automated integration of the multi-cloud environment, decreasing the need for so many different skills and toolsets. Leaders that invest in cloud-first development give themselves the opportunity to combine services in the most optimized way.

Democratizing Data

The greatest return on data will come when access and analytics are available throughout the enterprise by putting data and analytics in the hands of employees in order to drive better outcomes. Companies want data and analytics to be used in every part of the organization where it can deliver value, which of course is everywhere. In order to achieve this they feel that they need to re-plumb the data supply chain from ingestion to disposition and they are not aware of solutions that actually do this. Such solutions do exist by the way.

Relying on a data scientist in the middle doesn’t scale. Self service analytics is one way forward, eliminating the need for valuable engineers to sherpa data towards and across the value threshold. The better solution is to give people tools so that they can not only access the data, but trust and understand it. DataBraid.io is an example of one such service.

Data ROI

What’s holding organizations back from making more of these investments that ultimately enable them to derive more value from their data? Today most data sits stationary waiting to be processed in order to provide value. Companies need to view their data stores as not just stored assets, but as a raw material they need to process to turn into someone actionable and valuable across the business. Connecting the dots between the capabilities that enable insight and the resulting business value is the key.

Stay tuned for Part 3 where I will wrap up the series with a view on analytics.

Bonus Tip - for those who have read this far

So what are the "cool kids" using?

One of the benefits of being in Silicon Valley is having early access to new technology and being able to socialize with innovators. When it comes to democratizing software development there is much happening in the area of "no-code / low-code", enabling anyone from the most experienced coders to hobbyists to subject matter experts and citizen developers to create sophisticated solutions without having to code. This movement is accelerating innovation in many companies and will be the norm in a few years time. To learn more about no-code solutions you may reach out and connect with John Scharber the Founder and CEO of PavedRoad and an acknowledged expert on the subject. For you software architects and developers out there, John has some cool software tools available for free so connecting may be worth your while.