Tying an agile data management strategy to business goals
“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
These, the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes stories, were penned in the late 1800s, and refer to being opinionated without facts, which is certainly a situation we can relate to more than a century later.
Like sailors looking out over a vast ocean, today we’re surrounded by plethora of data — but with most of it unusable for our purposes, it needs to be filtered and analyzed before it can provide any clear insight to our business leaders.
Most large organizations have amassed many petabytes of data, often stored in inflexible legacy systems that are decades old. Now, as more and more interactions with customers become digital, there is an enormous potential to use data to better understand customers and create superior experiences – tailored to certain segments, demographics, or even to single individuals.
As we evolve from regular business processes to digital businesses, those companies that do not have a sharp focus on data will fail to keep up with their more advanced peers.
Data is absolutely crucial for an organization to realize the promise of “bi-modal” or “dual-speed” IT – a framework in which organizations can achieve resilience and efficiency in their infrastructure-data-processes value chain, while also being nimble enough to adapt to new technology trends. It is essential for today’s winning businesses to keep a dual focus: on both the “run the business” aspect (where the goal is to strengthen the core), and the “change the business” aspect (creating flexibility to innovate).
Strengthening the core requires a professional approach to enterprise data management, data quality, data integration and the delivery of data to the right people in the organization.
