It’s certainly no secret that data has been growing in volume, variety and velocity, and most companies are overwhelmed by managing it, let alone harnessing it to put it to work.
We’re now generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and 90% of the world’s data volume has been created in the past two years alone. With this absolute data explosion, it’s nearly impossible to filter out the time-sensitive data, the information that has immediate relevance and impact on your business.
And this time sensitivity is a massive issue, as taking a proactive and data-driven approach can literally mean life or death to your business or to your customers. And that’s where data analytics can play a huge role.
By leveraging the power of the cloud, harnessing data from the Internet of Things (IoT) and other events, and processing this data in near-real time, analytics helps to effectively process the relentless incoming data feed.
Without automation and the development of a governed data pipeline, you’ll never have enough data scientists in the front office to put the data to work. The benefits of fast time to insights is clear, regardless of the industry you’re in.
Think about these examples: a communications agency that needs to get out in front of a difficult message, a retailer driving sales based on real-time customer behavior, a logistics and delivery company needing to understand road conditions, stoppages and up-to-the-minute weather, or a hospital that needs to tailor patient care based on the latest public health findings.
Your data needs to fuel rapid decisions that make your organization more effective, customer-centric and competitive. This was true before the world changed.
COVID-19 Changed Everything
COVID changed everything. It’s a radical disruptor the likes of which we’ve never seen.
As a CEO, a husband and a father, I’ve made decisions during the past seven months that I never dreamed possible, and I’m sure this is true for you and your family – and business – as well.
Now to survive and thrive in the face of radical disruption requires radical transformation and new business models. Reimagining business, like moving fitness centers outdoors, or developing new products and services, such as restaurants packaging fruits and vegetables to sell as food bundles, or market expansion, like traditional grocers that are becoming online shopping hubs.
The companies that come out of this historic period of global uncertainty and change are those who’ve taken intelligent and data-driven approaches to their businesses.
What holds most companies back from faster time to insights and leveraging radical transformation? I think those answers can be found by asking these core questions:
- What data do I have?
- Where is the data?
- What people and systems are using that data and for what purposes?
- What processes should governance use?
- How is this data relevant and accessible to the business?
Data Intelligence Provides an EDGE
There’s a common denominator in what they’re all missing, and that is data intelligence.
IDC defines data intelligence as business, technical, relational, and operational metadata that provides transparency of data profiles, classification, quality, location, context, and lineage, providing people, processes, and technology with trustworthy, reliable data.
In a new IDC Solution Brief, “The Value of Robust Data Intelligence to Enable Data Governance with erwin,” its authors state:
Data is the lifeblood of the digital economy — it is what is driving new business models, better customer experiences, better decision-making, and artificially intelligent automation. The global pandemic in 2020 has accelerated digital transformation and amplified the value of data in what will become the next normal as the global economy struggles through recovery. In a world where market conditions, supply chains, work locations, and communication methods are constantly changing, data is a constant source that can be used to inform decisions from crisis to recovery. To use data effectively, it needs to be trusted, understood, and used appropriately, and herein lies many problems that organizations face in the digital economy.
The IDC authors also interviewed erwin customers who described the erwin Data Intelligence Suite, part of the erwin EDGE platform, as a fundamental component of their efforts to generate more value from data while minimizing data-related risk.
The erwin EDGE helps organizations unlock their potential by maximizing the security, quality and value of their data assets, and it operationalizes these steps by connecting enterprise architecture, business process and data modeling with data intelligence software.
The result is an automated, real-time, high-quality data pipeline from which accurate insights can be derived.
The erwin EDGE enables organizations to see how data flows through and impacts all their business, technology and data architectures. Then all stakeholders within a company, those in IT as well as the larger enterprise, can collaborate to make better decisions based upon data truth, not just gut instinct.
Parts of this blog are excerpted from my keynote on day No. 1 of erwin Insights 2020, our virtual conference on enterprise modeling and data governance/intelligence.
You can view the entire keynote and all other sessions of the conference by registering here.
