The data explosion has created a conundrum for many businesses, which have bought into the big-data dream only to find that they still can’t unlock the value of their data.
Business units are intrinsically self-preserving, after all – and when that instinct drives line-of-Business managers to hoard data they see as valuable, the efficacy of data analytics suffers.
Renee Lahti knows this all too well: as chief information officer of data-management consultancy Hitachi Vantara, she has toppled one conceptual wall after another while transforming the way the company saw and used its data.
Like most companies, the organisation initially followed core big-data tenets such as the creation of a ‘data lake’ where all of the company’s data would be dumped and, theory goes, available across the business to instantly provide amazing new insights.
The truth, Lahti found, was quite different.
“This whole ‘build it and they will come’ theory, where you dump all your data and every line of business will go find their value, didn’t work,” she said.
“The project went live and the CFO went looking for the return on her investment and it didn’t show up.”
The challenges of big-data ROI have been well documented, with Gartner predicting years ago that 60 per cent of big-data projects would be abandoned after failing to deliver.
Less than a year ago, the firm noted, 87 per cent of companies still have low business intelligence and analytics maturity.
The ongoing struggles of big-data investments have sent companies back to the drawing board as they realise all the optimism in the world isn’t going to deliver ROI without help.
ANZ chief data officer Emma Gray told the recent Melbourne Business School Business Analytics Conference that “the fear of doing the wrong thing has meant people have locked their data behind Fort Knox doors and made it very hard to access it.”
Working to outline a more coherent data strategy, Gray talked with business leaders who begged her not to, for example, share proprietary risk data with other business units.
“They were terrified to go have a conversation,” Gray said, “and the big fear was that I was going to take all that data and let [other business units] go to town and start doing really stupid, crazy things.”
Gray found common ground in the bank’s ongoing commitment to development operations (DevOps) philosophy – an application-development methodology that helps Agile teams work together more collaboratively and iteratively.
ANZ has previously reported “fantastic” results helping thousands of staff embrace DevOps, and Gray says this ongoing transformation helped her reframe the conversation around data in less territorial terms.
Rather than being something that had to be sacrificed and dumped into a generic data lake, data became seen as a common business asset to be strategically shared and guided.
Among other things, this involved rebalancing the bank’s skills development strategies and the makeup of its teams.
