Think back to just a few short years ago. You sat down with your morning coffee and opened your email and a browser and perused headlines from your feeds.
Big data was the hot celebrity of the day. Managing and storing it, optimizing your data warehouse, and BI.
Today, size is no longer the important story around data. Everyone knows that data is big. What matters now is your organization’s ability to harness ever-present data to improve the bottom line. To do that, you first need to reimagine your organization’s relationship to data.
Why a New Approach Is Needed
Today’s data is ubiquitous, complex, unstructured and fast-moving. This is a different data landscape from that of the past decades. Three crucial trends have shaped the current landscape:
- Disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Things, Hadoop, and mobile devices have opened limitless possibilities.
- Unimagined variety and volume of data is now generated from ever-increasing numbers and types of sources.
- Unrivaled processing power is available for lower cost than ever before
Change Your Approach and Transform Your Business
This new data landscape has the potential to revolutionize your business, but a new mindset is needed. You can create that mindset and start the transformation in your business with three steps:
- Awaken your data
- Discover
- Deploy
Awaken Your Data
First, see data for what it is: a pervasive, fast-moving asset that holds value all along its lifecycle, not just when it is stored and analyzed. In addition to mining data for historical insights, demand more of it by extracting value while it is still in motion through technologies such as event stream processing.
Furthermore, recognize that data is no longer the domain of specialists. In the past, data was locked away in apps that ran business operations or informed sales and marketing departments. The data that permeates business today flows from social media, sensors and a growing host of connected devices. It has the potential to illuminate every aspect of the business from marketing to manufacturing to shipping to customer satisfaction.
When you have begun to awaken your data, you will also begin to think differently about data management. The nature of today’s data calls for management beyond boundaries—the ability to manage data at multiple touchpoints, whether in memory, in streams, in an on-premises database or in the cloud.
The Data section of this site tells you more about how to realign your thinking with the new realities of complex, unstructured, fast-moving data.
Discover
Having decided to learn what your business data has to offer, the next step is discovery.
In the past, line-of-business managers had to wait for IT or data analysts to run batch reports on stored data to learn about the health of the business.
Today, some users inside your organization are eager to tap into business data to see what it holds. When you give these people tools to explore data without the intervention of IT or data analysts, you empower them to ask new questions or to tackle old questions in new ways. Tools like self-service data exploration and self-service analytics let your business increase the pool of analysts who are using data to drive new solutions and greater efficiencies.
The Discovery section will tell you more about self-service tools that can set your creative explorers free to discover value hidden in business data.
Deploy
Even the most earth-shattering data-driven insight is merely academic if it cannot be placed into production. Deployment is the process of turning what you learned in the discovery phase into processes or products that drive business success.
For example, data analysts can build predictive models based on insights uncovered by business managers. These models could predict customer churn and drive changes in service processes that help your organization keep more customers.
During the deploy phase, IT can build governance into processes so that data stays secure and the company remains in compliance with industry and government regulations.
The Deployment section of this site discusses how the right tools and technologies can help you turn creative exploration into information that can boost the bottom line.
The new world of always-on data is here, and now you have a choice. You can approach data like you have in the past, with a focus on management and storage so the flood of information does not become a problem. Or you can change your approach and let more people tap into business data to create better data-driven insights.
Learn more about the new realities of data. Explore this site to find out how you can discover what your data holds and then deploy data-driven solutions that have real business impact.
