Enterprises continue to mature in the art of acquiring data whether this is structured or unstructured. But having data alone has proven to be no predictor of whether a business is successful at drawing insights from the data.
Gartner says data-driven organisations struggle with increasing data diversity; its producers, consumers and distributed nature; and automation demands to relieve strained resources. As they look at data management solutions, care must be taken to look for solutions that provide agility, resilience and simplicity across the data landscape to increase business impact.
Angel Viña, founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, says the pandemic has caused a fast pace of change and businesses must adapt.
He observed that businesses struggle when they need to adapt and modify their business processes – from the way they use their data assets, to the way they interact with their customers.
“We’re suddenly executing our business practices remotely with different styles or different technology stacks. While some companies took advantage of the situation by implementing the right tools and technology – others suffered and went out of business.”
Angel Viña
He posited that organisations must have the flexibility to adapt their processes – which makes data management a priority in achieving this.
What is an appropriate set of strategies for organisations to be able to access the data that exists at their organisation?
Angel Viña: Data is critical in finding business opportunities. Everyone that tries to be data-driven has some sort of strategy to increase data utilisation to make better decisions. Data management is a vital piece. It is not about how you store or compute the data – it's how you use it.
Businesses need to ask what kind of self-service capabilities, or what kind of data democratisation strategies are available.
The second factor is efficiency. Businesses need to apply common sense to the infrastructure they create and understand their organisation’s needs. You can go wild and build data repositories in multi or hybrid clouds. But at some point, there’s an explosion of silos that is not manageable. So, data management helps in growing your data ecosystem in a manageable and efficient way.
The third factor is compliance, governance, and security. These are the top priorities for business leaders as they lower risks, secure the data, and understand the use of the data in our organisations. No one wants to be in the headlines for lack of compliance.
Can you cite some typical examples of mistakes organisations make as they're trying to get a better handle on managing the data that they have?
Angel Viña: We’ve noticed that businesses jump on the latest technology trend without doing a good analysis of their business requirements. Decisions over your data infrastructure such as data movement, ETL pipes, data replication, and migration to the cloud will affect how your organisation runs. We need to see more common sense and rationality behind all these decisions.
Analysts should be asking; how does the organisation operate? What kind of infrastructure is needed to address my business priorities? It must be taken with a top-down approach before business leaders start considering the latest technologies. What kind of data technologies stack do I need to build my reference architecture? How much do I need on-prem versus on-cloud? How do I build things without being vendor locked?
Because with technology, it is the continuous modernisation of a legacy product, but the business is something that will still be there and persist through time.
How does an organisation decide which data management solution is best for them?
Angel Viña: The best thing to do is to have good advisors or data strategists in your payroll to help you decide. Don't just follow the influence of the technology vendors – some might bring a big portfolio of products and try to convince you that they have everything you need.
The internal know-how of the organisation and its business functions are important before you bring in vendors for technological solutions.
With IT, it is still very much about discussing tools and systems, and very little about business insights or data engineering to support business insights. However, more companies are evolving where they start to organise these IT functions in areas which are much aligned with the business needs, not just purely IT technicalities.
How can decision-makers then prepare themselves to better obtain faster access to higher-quality data so that they can make better decisions?
Angel Viña: This is aligned with Denodo’s value proposition in the market – to provide organisations with the tools to make their lives easier. We have brought the technology to extract all these technological details about how data is stored, and how data is computed – so that businesses can focus more on data usage.
With this in place, businesses can focus on data utilisation, providing new data sources, sharing data for collaboration, controlling the data traffic, adding AI/ML capabilities, or automating data that helps them make better business decisions.
"Ultimately, it’s about having the right skills and people and choosing the right tool that is flexible, agile, and compliant to help organise your data ecosystem. Only then can you start building and evolving that infrastructure to the next level."
Angel Viña
Click on the PodChat player and hear Viña elaborate on the challenges organisations face in their quest to become more data-driven.
- How has data management evolved over the pandemic? What lessons can we draw from here?
- How can businesses build a strategy to best access and utilise their data as their operations become more complex?
- Can you cite some typical mistakes organisations experience when managing data?
- Given the many different technologies and approaches to data management – for example, distributed vs centralised data management, how does an organisation decide what is best for them?
- We expect a slow but positive recovery in the years ahead. What is certain is that uncertainties are here to stay. How can decision-makers best prepare themselves to obtain faster access to high quality-data to make better business decisions?
