Enterprises are sitting at the centre of a storm, where more innovations are coming to the fore and leaving their IT in a state of flux. New products, services, and capabilities are making their B2B networks extremely complex.
What actions should they take to stem this tide?
First, they need to set up a data-driven culture, bottom up, for making incremental changes to operations, monetizing data assets, and accommodating new products. A thoroughly established data culture brings IT to a more ambient & contextual state and guides enterprises in their transformation journey. It synchronizes technologies and smooths the path for enterprise technology management. Enterprises should consider the following steps to set up a data-driven culture:
1. Enable a Surgical Portfolio of Information Assets: Unfortunately, most enterprises sit on huge piles of data but they don’t have any idea of how to leverage this data. The information assets should be layered in an order and aligned with the organizational objectives.
Enterprises don’t have to restructure everything from scratch for doing this. They should envision a strategy for enabling quick access to stakeholders in a network, addressing aging systems, and avoiding long-standing data issues. They should plan a model that translates information into value.
It is quintessential for organizations to identify & map information systems. Enterprises should prepare detailed mapping flows and every aspect of processes. This practice helps in verifying the strengths or weaknesses of the processes and areas which need improvements.
2. Liberate Data: In the second step, enterprises should liberate their data from functional silos. Liberating data from silos can be an enormous advantage, it helps in preparing the data for analytics, harnessing insights and exposing data as shared service. Banking, insurance and healthcare players can reuse the data in a better way and optimize service quality.
Simultaneously, enterprises can protect information with a secure key management system to encrypt the information. They can reduce business risks by exchanging data with partners in a secured manner.
3. Inculcating a Data-Driven Culture: Enterprises should understand that technology is just a small part of the picture and the bigger aspect is data-driven culture. The top leadership should urge employees to put data at the heart of operations. They should incentivize employees who champion data.
Self-Service integration can help teams in achieving this goal, it allows even non-technical business users to maneuver data and move it towards the stream of opportunities. Business users get easy-to-use tools to operationalize machine intelligence. More importantly, they get a collaborative B2B ecosystem for hassle-free electronic data exchange.
4. Shorten Time-to-Analytics: Enterprises can miss out on valuable business opportunities if they can’t get access to insights on time. In most cases, teams waste several months of time in building connections and moving data to the production. To avoid this, they should have systems in place to organize and prepare data for analytics in a timely manner.
Highly productive enterprises use start-to-end integration for quickly moving static and rigid data between conventional & cloud-based systems. Automated mode of data transfer pipes data between source and target systems to significantly shorten the time to analytics.