Real-Time Data: A Key Cloud Trend for Enterprises in 2022
The unfortunate reality of today’s highly digitized and cloud-powered organizations is that most continue to struggle to reach anything close to the full potential value of their data. Yet for most companies, their data remains the single most under-leveraged, high value asset they have. The CIOs I’ve spoken to in the last several years about challenge this still decry that they still cannot buy or build systems that fully tap into what the organization actually knows from the information already on hand.
The Prime Challenge: Getting Data to Where It Needs to Be
Yet properly unleashing the value of data has long been the primary end goal of enterprise digitization and transformation in most organizations. Building capabilities to manage its growth, velocity, scale, and agility are and will continue to be a foundational activity of a strong business, as well as strategic, future-looking activities like digital transformation. Enterprises have spent the better part of the last decade starting to open up their data silos to unleash data across the organization, all while powering more and more automation with that data. CIOs and tech leaders must now be a strategic “enabler to ensure data fully serves the organization”, as I noted recently.
In short, much progress has been made with putting data to work, but it’s still not enough. A large gap remains between what is possible and what many organizations are actually achieving. What’s more, this gap has significant disruptive and competitive implications.
In recent years, there have been several generations of market activity around the tools and technologies to improve how well we can actually use the data that directly informs and empowers our businesses. These cycles have variously included data lakes, data warehouses, backward-looking data analytics, and business intelligence.
More recently, many companies have also begun to aggregate and transform their data storage ecosystems by moving to the cloud. Most recently, the push has been to adopt cloud-native architectures, to tap into better models for using the cloud and make new IT investments more future-proof, among other benefits.
Yet all of this is not sufficiently addressing the core challenge in getting value from an organzation’s data estate. One key trend is to use data to enhance analytics capabilities and improve increasingly personalized digital customer journeys. But a surprisingly small number of enterprises have genuinely harnessed the power of the relevant data to achieve the revenue potential that is possible.
The reasons for this, after observing a great many different efforts and their stable of data technologies and techniques over the years: Companies’ most valuable data, created through the countless interactions they have with their customers, still remains too-firmly trapped in the next generation of silos, or if it’s unleashed, cannot be tapped into in sufficient timeframes.
Despite all the investments we’ve made, the very platforms and tools we use to harvest data for our systems themselves can actually foster new silos of operational data. Unexpectedly, these new data farms have expanded rapidly to support urgent and important activities like digital transformation. And that’s not all: As application and IT systems became ever-more decoupled and finer-grained, they have proliferated in number, creating new silos faster than we can eliminate them. Finally, even if data can be accessed, it often cannot be reached rapidly enough to support today’s increasingly fast-moving digital business processes. The key mantra here is simply that data in silos tends to be data not used.
