Three solutions for data analytics leaders

Analytics and data literacy is fundamental to how people and organizations understand key business concepts, make decisions, and determine answers. While most organizations understand the importance of data, many struggle to turn it into meaningful information that can be used across business departments for efficient and effective decision making. And to make the right decisions at the right time, data needs to be accurate. This means the success of any business relies heavily on how it collects, stores, analyzes, processes, and manages its data.

Data is an abundant asset that keeps adding value 

Over the past few years, the volume of available data has grown exponentially. Data is now generated from everywhere (think IoT devices, customer interactions, chatbots, and social media) providing deeper insight into human behavior. As a result, data is now considered to be the most valued corporate asset.

Data and analytics transforming into a core business function is listed as one of Gartner’s Top 10 Trends in Data and Analytics. According to Gartner, data will become a profitable business asset, adding more revenue streams, streamlining cost and operations, and providing agility to meet customer demands.

Low-code and no-code cloud-based analytics applications are empowering users to explore their data and launch new projects. Take the Formula 1 team Oracle Red Bull Racing. They launched a one-of-a-kind loyalty program that delivers unique personalized experiences to fans, rewarding them for digital interactions and bringing them closer than ever to the action on the track. Another great example is FedEx, who tapped the power of data and cloud to respond to business challenges in real time, and better support organic and acquired growth.

IT and data leaders are using data to drive business impact

With data generated from activities everywhere in our lives, access to meaningful information is an expectation that continues to grow. To realize data’s full potential, it is important for organizations to develop a strong and focused data strategy and identify a champion to oversee it. This is where data and analytics leaders play a pivotal role.

Data and analytics leaders are now as critical for driving business decisions as finance or human resources. As more organizations rely on CDOs and CIOs, IT and data leaders are acting as agents of change, empowering their enterprises to become more analytics driven. Gartner announced that by 2022, 30% of CDOs will partner with their CFO to formally evaluate their organization’s information assets. They are spear-heading data analytics strategies to transform business processes and customer-facing solutions and to optimize digital experience

Data and analytics leaders can help enterprises bring value from their analytics with a data architecture that acts as a single source of truth. This helps break down silos and consolidate data from disparate sources to provide users with consistent access and delivery of data that meet their information needs. It can also help organizations adapt and foster an analytics-driven culture where data is perceived as an asset that is available across departments to evaluate predictions, make accurate decisions, and help ensure data privacy and compliance.

Below, we explore three solutions for data leaders that are key to helping organizations move in the right direction.

Build a single-unified platform for all data, analytics and AI

Today, most data resides in silos. To enable analytics from data, unifying data from all sources—including IoT devices, business applications, data lakes, and databases—is key. This creates a single enterprise-wide view that combines cloud-based and on-premises data and presents a complete, secure, and accurate picture of what is happening in a business. It also enables business analysts to perform more robust and granular analyses.

Data leaders can also help improve business performance and gain a competitive advantage by modernizing data management with a data lakehouse. A lakehouse architecture, built on open source and open standards, provides seamless and comprehensive data management, supporting analytics and AI/ML across all departments. This open data architecture combines the best elements of data lakehouse architecture with the performance of a data warehouse and adds analytics and data science capabilities.

Prioritize multicloud and hybrid environment strategies

With the pandemic as a catalyst, there has been a global surge in cloud adoption across industries. While private clouds (also known as internal clouds or corporate clouds) remain valuable, multicloud is becoming the norm. With thousands of services available in the market today, IT leaders need to select cloud options that meet their requirements for performance and price-point. Multicloud and hybrid environments offer advantages like flexibility to deploy the best capabilities, avoiding vendor lock-in with the freedom to deploy the latest and greatest technology solutions, data sovereignty, and cost-efficiencies.

However, operating and managing a multicloud and hybrid environment poses distinct challenges like integration with multiple diverse solutions, managing costs, data protection, and privacy. IT and data leaders need to address these hurdles to help their organizations succeed with a multicloud approach.

Build a strong data governance foundation

To build an effective and strong foundation, data leaders should evaluate the data within an organization, where it is located, and how it is being used, all to improve its quality and reliability. Focus should be placed on data interoperability, security, and data architecture. It’s important to stay abreast of ever-changing data privacy compliance, ensuring only the right individuals are accessing sensitive business data while complying with regulatory mandates like GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and others. This allows data leaders to understand the organization’s data, providing stakeholders a shared understanding of each piece of data, where it comes from, how it moves through enterprise tools, and what it means to the organization.

The time to address data analytics priorities is now

In an era where data is growing exponentially, IT and data leaders need to manage their data as a vital business asset, build a strong data culture, and bring it to the forefront of decision making. Oracle Cloud can help organizations discover valuable and actionable insights from all types of data—in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment.

Get started with Oracle Cloud or to learn how today’s CIO use data and cloud as the engine for business agility, read the How today’s CIOs use data and the cloud as the engine of business agility eBook.