Unlocking the potential of your organisation’s data

The service and platform marketplace has moved on so much that it is now easier than ever to use your organisation’s data for…clever stuff!

You have data, trust me

I’m going to focus on a few things here, and yes, that means I will miss out a few others. That said, let’s start with the obvious. To do any type of transformation, you need to have some data (you do have some data, trust me!), you need to know where it is, what it is and be able to read/integrate with it.

Enter the “Discovery” phase that almost everyone will need to go through. I could take up a whole article explaining to you how you might go about this, but I will give you the shorthand –  pay someone to do the discovery for you, using tools you won’t need to ever own, and a skillset you probably won’t need to have for the long term inside your organisation anyway! (At this point every Account Manager in Softcat reading this is pleading with me to list our services and partners in this space).

You know more about your data

Let’s jump ahead to the point where you know what data you have. It’s classified, secure, and you want to do “clever stuff” with it. My challenge to most customers is that their core value is in understanding what the data is in the first place, and what the potential actionable insight/outcome is from the effective use of the data. We call this a “use case”. No third-party data engineer or data scientist can walk through the front door of your business and know more about your data, people, processes, and problems than you/your people do.

So, the real value can be found in building out the use cases, defining where the value is and deciding what you want the outcome to be. It’s not in building out an expensive team of people, or upskilling an existing team, or investing in the myriad of specific tooling needed to achieve these outcomes.

Buy in the services you need

Instead, you can buy all this in – as a service of course! XaaS ‘tis the future don’t you know! Players like Workato and service partners such as Virtuoso Partners can facilitate the platform and engineering capabilities you need to dramatically reduce your time to value.

The trends in the marketplace are supporting this to some degree too. The core trends I am seeing in the data integration and automation market are:

• 1. The convergence of integration and automation services
• 2. The democratisation of enterprise automation
• 3. The role of AI everywhere

If we look at the legacy approach to integration, businesses used to invest in large ESB (enterprise service bus) tooling and separate transform tooling, as well as data warehouses and the requisite storage overheads. These days, the market has shifted, and most iPaaS (integration platform as a service) tooling out there is capable of not only delivering the core capabilities of iPaaS, ESB, ETL (extract, transfer, load), MFT (managed file transfer), Event Brokerage etc., but also API (application programming interface) gateway capabilities, BPA (business process automation), RPA (robotic process automation), LCAP etc. This is a huge leap and drives a huge functional uptick, but also one of complexity. So again, why run this? Buy the service in.

The democratisation of the outcomes is the point I was raising above – being given a fish vs being given a fishing rod and copy of Fly Fishing by J R Hartley (if you get that reference you are as old as I am!). Democratisation of delivery is no longer seen as shadow IT, it’s a business approach. The numbers also support that this is no longer about giving “the business” a bike with the training wheels on. It’s not about low complexity, Mickey Mouse outcomes. Studies are showing that high-complexity, high-value use cases are being defined and delivered alongside business process owners outside of IT.

The role of artificial intelligence

How would an article be an article these days without the obligatory reference to AI. Once you have an integrated and validated data set/model, the art of the possible in relation to machine learning and AI is only constrained by the definition of the requirement or use case!  AI is only going to serve to push democratisation of these services, and reduce operational costs whilst improving overall quality of what it is your business does.

The time is now to venture into modern data architecture with anger. Whether you are talking to your technology partners and suppliers about digital experience, observability, automation, app Development, cost reduction, growth, etc., you will be able to boil down most, if not all, of it to a single foundational dependency—data!

I have had the pleasure of working with some very forward-thinking customers in this space recently, as well as some very capable partners and service providers—I won’t mention you here by name, but you know who you are! With the rollout of tech like Copilot from Microsoft into most organisations, the data conversation is becoming increasingly important and, sadly (for me), one I really love getting involved in.

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

― Jim Barksdale

This is not just a quote from a notable ex-CEO of Netscape and ex-COO of FedEx but also an insight into how I manage my team… I jest… maybe.

Find out more

You can catch up with our most recent webinar with Workato, ‘Effective use of data within your business’ to find out more. You’ll discover how iPaas can revolutionise your business operations through streamlining data integration, automating workflows, and improving operational efficiency.