Setting up a new data analysis project should be collaborative. It requires personnel from different departments in the company, including IT and those in the business organization, to come together with an understanding of each other's roles, concerns, and needs.
However, a lot of the time business and IT don't quite understand each other. Business users can struggle to get data from IT to start a new analytics project, while IT is bombarded with an unreasonable number of requests to set up new projects. If you've ever been on either side of these frustrations, it might be time to consider a data warehouse in the cloud.
In our new blog series,
Data Hurdles, we look into some common data management challenges that enterprises face daily. First up: setting up new data analysis projects.
Can't We All Get Along: IT & Business
The business organization and IT can have a tenuous relationship at the best of times, but data can be a particularly sticky issue. Why does it take so long to get my data set? Why can't we improve the feature set and functionality? Why can't I do it myself?
Most of these issues come from a lack of mutual understanding. Business users should understand that to provide data for an ad hoc project, data has to be located, downloaded, cleaned up, and prepared for analysis. On top of that, business users tend to request multiple features that are often not easy to implement. Setting up an integrated SaaS data warehouse improves response time between IT and the rest of the departments because everyone needs to work together to decide what data is essential for the business.
Limited Resources, Unlimited Needs
Sometimes business users simply need data to do their jobs, and it can feel unnerving to wait helplessly. IT personnel, on the other hand, are busy setting up infrastructure for the entire organization and fixing time-sensitive technical issues. As a result, requests from different teams for access to specific sets of data might not be a high priority for them. Data ends up languishing in a database or missed because the communication channels between business and IT aren't efficient.
Centralizing data in the cloud enables business users to be clear about the specific data they need because there is only one source. IT also has more time to help the business organization because the cloud service provider will be responsible for any infrastructure and technical issues.
Get your free SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Trial today.
Data Silos
There are lots of reasons that data might not be shared throughout a company. Departments can be territorial when it comes to their data. Sometimes they don't understand the value their data can bring to other business units. Often, they don't know it exists and, even if they do, they struggle with accessing it. Whatever the reason, when data remains locked up in closed silos, the company's decision making will suffer.
Centralizing data in a data warehouse, by its very nature, requires data silos to be dismantled. For example, companies with multiple products will often have marketing-and-sales departments for each product, each of whom will have access to their own datasets. If you centralize all your data in a data warehouse cloud, sales and marketing performance can be tracked among different products. Finance may look at this data and see a way to save money, while the product team may see an opportunity to work on an existing product or service. However, that will never happen if the data remains hidden in different departments.
Empower Business with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud allows IT to access data from hundreds of sources and grant authorization to different business units in the organization quickly. With our customers in mind, we designed Spaces, a virtual work environment in which administrators can give access to different data to specific departments, teams, or even a single employee. On top of that, the data warehouse cloud architecture allows for storage and computing resources to be easily split among different Spaces. Resource allocation can be managed with a click of a button and reallocated with the current needs of the project.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is the only end-to-end data management and decision-making cloud solution designed for business. It empowers IT users to easily grant authorization and business users to use that data in a simple user interface. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is a self-service solution, so you can get it up and running in no time.
Read more: What are Spaces?
