Is data management a thorn in IT’s side?
Modern business leaders depend on data – it provides insights into operational performance, customer needs, supplier risks, market opportunities and essentially every other facet of business. More data is a good thing, right? It means the business is processing more transactions, selling more products and has more information at its disposal to make decisions. While this may be true, if the data in your organization is inaccurate or inconsistent, remains unchecked and continues to grow unmanaged, then it may quickly evolve from being an asset into a massive liability. Managing a company’s data is the responsibility of the CIO and the IT organization. Are they ready, or is data management a thorn in the side of IT?
At the heart of IT’s data challenges are people. During the past few decades, IT organizations have focused on recruiting and developing staff with deep technology skills in hardware and software, often forgetting that IT stands for “Information Technology,” not just technology. More recently, many CIOs have increased their focus on resolving this skillset mismatch by bringing more information management, data science and analytics skills to their organizations.
While IT data skills have struggled to match needs, business users who consume data have increased their data analysis abilities at an alarming rate. Self-Service reporting tools have increased in popularity during the past few years, making it easier for business users to analyze data from source systems instead of depending on IT to provide reports. During the past, issues with missing, inaccurate or duplicated data could be filtered, scrubbed and managed prior to exposing the data to business users. Self-service capabilities expose data issues directly to users who often will ask IT for an explanation of why the issues exist and want them fixed, usually immediately.
IT also struggles with the fluidity of business needs related to data. Because information insights are primarily used to drive decision making, the useful life of a specific set of information may be short. After one decision is made, the business shifts focus to the next opportunity or challenge. From IT’s perspective, as soon as one business problem is solved there are more waiting to be addressed. Understanding this dynamic is helpful for IT organizations, but it may require a change in mindset and approach. IT staff members are notorious for over-engineering solutions. When it comes to data, they need to focus on agility, not permanence – delivering just enough information to enable the business decision (and delivering it quickly)!
High-value business insights almost always involve integrated information from disparate data sources. When those data sources are from different vendors and software products, correlating and validating the data can be very complicated. Traditional integration and data warehousing methods built around manual mapping, merging and validation processes struggle to address the volume of data and continual changes in business needs.
Modern technology capabilities for data integration and validation can provide IT organizations the opportunity to overcome many of these challenges. Combined with upgrades in the data management skillset and mindset of IT staff, CIOs and their organizations can remove the thorn in IT’s side and be well prepared to manage their company’s data to ensure that it remains an asset that will continue to create value for many years.
A great example of this is Pacific Life, whose IT organization needed to automate the maintenance of more than 100,000 configuration items that supported their service delivery to the business, and was able to do so quickly and relatively easily using Blazent’s Data Intelligence and Integrity solution.