Business change is accelerating at an alarming rate and as it does, IT organizations struggle to maintain the pace. Business users are taking on an increasingly important role in selecting the technology tools they need to perform their jobs – often without consulting the technologists in IT. Cloud services and the availability of third-party devices and software services makes initial adoption easier. These, however, are creating challenges for IT staff members tasked with ensuring business continuity and managing overall IT costs and technical debt while stewarding the rapidly growing data assets of the company.
Many business users complain that IT is too slow at enabling the technology changes necessary to support the speed of business evolution. IT staffs are frustrated with business users bypassing processes and controls and bringing technology into the ecosystem without IT’s involvement. While this may seem like a self-perpetuating cycle, there is hope. The trick to enabling the technology evolution that any business requires is to focus less on the technology and more on data. After all, it is data that is created through business operations that drive decision making, and this is where the actual business value of IT resides.
Hardware and software will continue to change. The key success factor for supporting business change is the adaptability and agility of your organization to swap old technology for new. The most costly and time-consuming part of technology migration is managing the data from the old system, migrating what is needed to the new system (without bringing considerable baggage with you), and integrating the old and new data sets to provide continuity for analysis and decision making. This is often difficult because the data in the old system is viewed in the context of the technology, not as an independent variable.
If you view the data as being durable artifacts of business processes and technology and is simply there to capture, store, analyze, update and report on, then the technology (hardware and software) become nothing more than tools that are effectively disposable (progress on building a house should not be impacted if the carpenter buys a new hammer.). Business should not be impacted (more than momentarily for a cutover) if a technology component is replaced. The data needed to run operations is effectively unchanged.
In this data-centric approach to IT, it is assumed that data will be coming from a wide variety of source systems, both internal and external to your organization. Each data set will have varying degrees of structure, quality, accuracy and completeness. To manage the data diversity effectively, your company will need a robust capability for integrating data sets, reconciling conflicts and duplication, resolving quality issues and maintaining data context. With this capability, not only will you be better able to leverage the data assets you have today, but also changes in underlying technology will cause less of an impact when absorbed into your IT ecosystem while still providing business continuity.
Enabling rapid business evolution requires viewing technology not as a set of long-term assets, but as a set of temporary tools and resources that will frequently change as new tools are made available and as business needs change. IT organizations must make technology change management part of their normal way of working, and embrace a level of fluidity that may be uncomfortable. Integration and analysis are critical to ease the burden of data migration to make this possible. Blazent’s Data Quality Management solutions allow companies to gather diverse data sets and resolve the conflicts, gaps and duplication issues. The resulting set of data has the quality and trustworthiness needed to support effective business operations and decision making. Download the Data Powered IT white paper here to learn more, or contact us directly at sales@blazent.com.