Data, Not Technology, Steals The Spotlight In Digital Strategies

Digital innovation and investment are growing by leaps and bounds – and so is the data created and consumed by them. While experts acknowledge that analysis of structured and unstructured information, Internet of Things, and all forms of artificial intelligence is taking advantage of the availability of extensive data sets, it’s becoming evident that these capabilities are also adding even more information to already overwhelmed business systems.

Many companies believe that replacing traditional data warehousing tools with in-memory databases, Big Data architectures, and cloud service providers will calm the rising flood of data. This approach may move processing closer to the data to increase performance and speed while decreasing complexity, but it does not allow decision-makers to tap into the full value of this trove of insight.

Although these technologies are certainly valuable and transformative in their own right, organizations still need to maintain a single, standardized source of truth for business models, consolidate data access services, and define operations such as scheduling and monitoring.

Why data warehouses still matter

Explosive data growth is not just an opportunity to know what happened, why it happened, and how it will happen again. It’s also a new revenue stream that adds value to existing products and services.

According to IDC, this year’s revenue growth from information-based products will double that of product and service portfolio for one-third of Fortune 500 companies. As more companies buy and sell raw data and value-added insights that cross industry lines, data monetization is emerging as a primary source of revenue – and there are no signs of slowing down as the world steadily reaches 180 zettabytes of data by 2025, up from less than 10 zettabytes in 2015.

To fully realize the value of this massive volume of data, businesses need to upgrade their data warehousing tools, not render them obsolete. Optimized with in-memory computing, cloud platform, and Big Data solutions, data warehousing solutions help democratize decision-making power for all employees of every level. They can now connect past information with live data to analyze emerging risks and opportunities in the moment, address them just as quickly, and engage in real-time transactions.

This next-generation strategy for data warehousing opens the door to capabilities that enable potentially industry-disruptive business change such as:

• Innovate at the business’s pace: Expand IT’s focus beyond maintaining operations to finding new ways to grow the business.

• Create an adaptive, scalable operating model: Allow the IT function to upgrade and enhance capabilities and service levels with a more rationalized enterprise architecture.

• Reduce deployment time and cost: Coordinate a managed service model enabled by prebuilt tools designed to shrink implementation cycles and accelerate adoption. 

• Establish comprehensive service-level agreements and managed services across the solution landscape: Access industry and engineering expertise and best practices that help improve the management of the infrastructure; systems, technology, and applications; as well as industry and business processes and extensions.

The enabling force of digital initiatives is not just technology – it’s data too

A few years ago, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of Research at Gartner, proclaimed that everyone is a technology company. And while this was true at the time, driving digital transformation through technology has created a tsunami of data that cannot be ignored.

Hoarding a pile of data isn’t valuable in itself. Businesses must evolve from software companies to data companies to unleash tremendous value and protect the ecosystem from misuse and integrity breaches. By incorporating next-generation digital investments, from in-memory computing to the cloud and Big Data solutions, businesses can increase flexibility, heighten agility, and maintain reliability – all on one platform.

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This article originally appeared on the Digitalist Magazine and has been republished with permission.