Powering the Intelligent Business with the Right Data to the Right App at the Right Business Moment

According to Dun & Bradstreet’s “The Past, Present, and Future of Data” published in June 2019, more than half (56%) of business leaders admit that they have not yet realized the full potential of data, while almost half (47%) say that data has been largely a buzzword, rather than a serious consideration. As a result, more than half of business leaders (55%) say that, so far, they have not maximized the power of data to gain a competitive advantage.

And it’s obvious. Recently I was booking a hotel for later in 2021, and I had a discount code. But the website wouldn’t accept the code. And when I called the hotel, they couldn’t recognize the code and were going to charge me $50 more per night. Finally, the convention sponsor set up a special link with the hotel, but even that didn’t process the discount at first. And when I was at last able to register and pay at the discounted rate, the system wouldn’t recognize any good credit card.

The challenge

Most organizations have data scattered all about in different applications and data platforms. Their data is streaming into data lakes or is just simply not accessible. Siloed data makes it impossible to derive the necessary insights and collaborate effectively. Many of the core systems and processes that do exist are legacy systems that are incompatible with modern technology and workflow processes.

A lack of a modern, integrated data architecture is keeping businesses from realizing their potential with their customers, value chains, investors and employees. The result is that businesses will miss opportunities, as well as market share, as their competitors take a more modern approach to data.

The opportunity

When you have the data you need, where it’s needed and when it’s needed, you can:

• Understand your business in real time. With an end-to-end integrated data fabric feeding your analytics, reporting and alerting platforms, your business leaders will have a consumable synopsis of business activity, challenges and opportunities. And it will all be available in near real-time, with appropriate automated actions and manual intervention at their fingertips.
• Deliver superior customer experiences. The ability to accelerate innovation and excel at customer experiences is the lifeblood of keeping and expanding your customer base. In-the-moment data at the points of engagement is foundational to delivering superior customer experiences.
• Achieve business agility and speed. Agility is the ability to rapidly change and/or adjust to rapidly changing business circumstances. A modern, integrated data architecture provides the data needed to make decisions and act quickly. Delivering new and improved products and services is a must for any leading business to remain competitive, to lead, and to delight customers.
• Deliver new revenue streams and business models. New technology presents itself at an increasing pace, opening doors to new business opportunities driven by new interaction models, pricing/monetization models and quantity and quality of data available to be intelligently processed. New business models built on these opportunities open the door to new revenue streams, disruption of existing businesses and competitors and new levels of customer delight.

The solution

Getting the right data to the right application at the right business moment depends on having a modern data architecture. To accelerate innovation and remain competitive, companies must streamline and modernize their data architecture to align with their business objectives. Legacy infrastructure simply isn’t equipped for this. You need a cloud data platform that can operationalize AI to drive intelligent applications.

But to get this right, you need to start by defining the right strategy — followed by designing the infrastructure and tooling, and then maintaining and optimizing the environment. And that requires dedicated planning, data science and engineering expertise, and automated operations.

Three steps to realizing the full potential of your data

1. Assess

Start by understanding what data you have and craft a vision for what’s possible.

• Discovery and knowledge sharing. Uncover the possibilities with new cloud-based data architectures that leverage cloud analytics and big data services.
• Technical deep dive. Understand the “what” and “how” of the possible solutions using modern cloud data services and analytics.
• Solution ideation. Brainstorm and sketch out a high-level possible solution that fits your use cases and workloads. Define adjustments your business will need to take, in order maximize what’s possible and transform.

2. Design and build

Dive deeper into crafting an architecture to realize your business goals. Identify missing and isolated data. Design, implement, test and deploy with agility and DevOps.

• Discovery and planning. Build on your initial discoveries and brainstorming by reviewing data sources, data models, security and ingestion requirements and aligning to each use case. Explore possible scenarios, experiences and insight generation.
• Architect solutions. Design a solution that includes data ingestion patterns, data pipelines, schemas and integration flows.
• Start building. Begin coding and configuration as you’ve designed, in parallel with the next steps. Be sure to iterate using agile and DevOps processes.
• Ingest and transform. Now it’s time to create data ingestion pipelines, transform and load your data, validate and build quality control checks and automate your pipelines.
• Data lake modeling. Design your enterprise data warehouse schemas and models. Begin data aggregation and transformation, as well as query and analysis.
• Analytics and reporting. Create reports and dashboards, test them under various scenarios — including testing the user experience. It’s time for final hand-off and knowledge sharing.

3. Manage and optimize

Continually optimize your modern data architecture, add and refine data sources, add IoT, tune customer experiences and optimize your analytics and business insights dashboards.

• Define. Establish your ITSM protocols, train your staff and execute ongoing data management in the data platforms specified by your solution.
• Optimize. Continually optimize via data engineering, automation and development support.
• Collaborate. Work together within your business and with partners and IT, to continually learn and update the processes using the data, the core solution and the dashboards and reports.

Catch the vision

Data modernization enables you to get the right data to the right application at the right business moment, while delivering a new level of business insights. You can now lead your organization to a new level of intelligent execution, deliver superior customer experiences and create new revenue streams —thrusting your business to the top of your industry.

Our team is here to help you harness the power of modern data architecture and AI. Reach out to our team to get started.