Businesses today rely heavily on all forms of data for crucial decision-making. With increasing data sources and continually changing technology, data gets spread and stored in different silos as the business grows. There comes a point where the divide between collecting or recording data and utilizing it efficiently for business goals grows wider obstructing access to quality data.
Data Divide broadly covers the enterprise-level data issues that businesses face:
- Lack of data usage in a timely manner
- Cumbersome process to access high quality data
- Inability to offer continuous innovation
Technology defines the capabilities of an enterprise to compete in a global arena. As the era of big data takes hold, it is time for businesses and IT to collaborate and harness technology to create a fully supportive platform for business insights for the future. Just relying upon the traditional BI products, which are meant for IT and not for business users, is not enough to bridge the data divide.
Effective data analysis defines market winners
An effective analysis and reporting can elevate data from mere information to knowledge to competitive edge. Besides taking right decisions, business executives may actually create new business opportunities with the right type of data. Working with poorly defined analytics, incomplete data sources, and inability to handle mixed data types, can lead to partial information and knowledge, and the false belief among the business executives that the right decision has been made.
Use technology to simplify data
Technology should make data simple and understandable, rather than technical and complicated. With use of technical terminology and jargon, IT loses focus of the issues at hand. Businesses are not concerned with discussions on using SQL versus Non-SQL databases or Hadoop as a persistent store. Whether IT wants to regard the data sources as just another data problem, or cloudify it in with the big data debate, makes no difference. Businesses are interested in creating strategies and solutions based on the data to attain their enterprise objectives.
The key for IT and business is to communicate in the same language, the “human” language to understand and support each other. IT must ensure that it has the right tools to serve the business needs.
Blend data across data sources
As new data sources and types emerge, they have to be assimilated to prevent data silos. Old methods of data analytics can no longer keep pace with these requirements. Just analyzing data and generating hard-coded reports is not enough to convince customers and stakeholders about information security and to fulfil the laws of different geographies. The businesses must promptly demonstrate that governance is being actively monitored and maintained, instead of paying a mere lip service. A business-centric view of the problem and a result-oriented view for the present and future can bring a true differentiation in the market.
Identify capabilities to handle mixed data types
Traditional databases are passé. Today, it is important to work with mixed data sources – internal or external, structured or unstructured, relational or reference-only. When enterprises use several data sources to satisfy specific application needs, they hardly gain any contextual insights. All these data sources must be pulled together and analyzed through a single system that can be used effectively by the business executives themselves.
A true analytics solution can provide the much needed environment where decisions are made effectively, timely, and optimally. The right tools can make data fluid, ensure easy and right access for everyone in the enterprise, and take the business and its operations to the next level.
