EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
VOLHA SMIRNOVA , INTERNET OF THINGS & ANALYTICS BDM ,
EMEA CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE , SOFTWARE AG
Big Data as a concept is gaining popularity in business with new approaches to B2B integrations , data-driven decision making and greater business agility . Other challenges , facing enterprises may involve customer experience , which needs to be modernised and talent scarcity in organisations – especially when it comes to ecosystems with heavy dependencies on IT .
The average company with 200 to 500 employees uses the average of 123 SaaS applications these days to run multiple operations and organise a better data collection . While selecting the right tools is imperative , what comes prior is the purpose of data mining . If there is a system in place to glean the information , it ’ s with the help of IT / OT to optimise resources , reduce costs and better manage risks . Moreover , when a tool is selected to mine information , the same tool must be implemented to improve the experience of the customer . In organisations with no Big Data mining approaches , integration challenges keep arising , mainly due to the lack of connected sources and systems , which slows productivity and data access . The main challenge in operations is the disconnected project or programme management and enterprise architecture practices . Another risk , which becomes especially vivid when organisations are optimising operational expenses , is the indiscriminate cost cutting with no connection to business strategy . This all happens when data is stored in siloes .
To solve immediate challenges , businesses turn to external contractors to cover their periodic needs . And this approach is flawed , because , again , immediate
CIOs should therefore aim at empowering all employees with data skills , for example by investing into technological enablers such as self-service analytical tools . isolated improvements undermine the long term challenges and vision .
According to the BCG Global innovators survey : committed innovators are winning ( which are only 40 %), with 60 % of them , as reported , are generating a rising proportion of sales from products and services launched is the past three years . What this means is that Big Data is becoming a source of creating new revenue streams and launching the new data-enabled services , rather than activating new production cycles and modernising on the product or manufacturing cycles . Other key benefits would revolve around : improved customer insight , data governance , smarter customer targeting and data-driven innovation .
For CIOs , the whole idea of being a data driven organisation should focus on unlocking data from where it resides , analysing it to gain insights and use it to become a learning organisation , driving profitability and productivity .
However , the reality of the matter is that most organisations don ’ t achieve maximum value from this data as they store it for ‘ future use ’ without analysing it in real time . With this , they lose on what we know as perishable insights , whose value exponentially diminishes with time . Another key contributor of lack of achieving maximum value is also due to the disconnect between the domain experts who understand the business and the data scientists who analyse the data . To battle these challenges , CIOs should therefore aim at empowering all employees with data skills , for example by investing into technological enablers such as self-service analytical tools .
As Big Data is often unstructured and originating from siloed , disparate sources , IT leaders should consider integrating these multiple sources , further enriching this pool of information . As they do this integration , they need to ensure there is structure of this data for example by utilising data warehousing tools , so that it can be made available users and enterprise applications to consume seamlessly .
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