It’s now accepted that data-driven organisations have the competitive edge. But, for many there is still an organisational gap, with business users struggling to access the data they need.
IT departments want to help resolve the problem, but can be a bottleneck due the volume of requests they receive and a need to ensure governance and security requirements are met. How can this gap be bridged?
Here is a 5-step plan:
1. Create a data lake
A data lake is designed to store huge volumes of data regardless of format and content. It is stored with no predefined schema, combining data sources and avoiding information silos. This can reduce costs of data ownership and increase sharing and collaborating capabilities between teams.
2. Maintain data lake quality
Data lakes can easily grow out of control to the point where an organisation is drowning in information. IT needs to look after the data, applying governance so that only sanctioned data can be extracted from the lake. IT still has the task of making sure that the right data is shown to the right people at the right time; in other words, they must ensure the lake is kept secure. It’s only when this is complete that the lake is ready for access by the rest of the organisation.
3. Adopt data preparation
Data analysis was once a highly-specialised task which only an expert could undertake. Today, to bridge the organisational gap, business users can be empowered to prepare data for themselves prior to analysis. Gartner has predicted that by 2018 most business users and analysts will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis. Employees will become ‘information brokers’ with the freedom to prepare and analyse data themselves, helping accelerate time to insight, while IT is able to maintain data security and governance.
In fact, open source, self-service applications are already available now. These enable business users to explore, cleanse, enrich and combine data in minutes. They can then apply their own domain expertise as, after all, they are the best people to work directly with the data relevant to their business objectives.
4. Ensure data collaboration
The best tools help IT and business users work together collaboratively. Aim for data democracy, not anarchy. It will take coaching and guidance. IT will be responsible for control, rules and governance, otherwise the initiative will fail. Once business users gain confidence, IT can develop best practice data preparation rules based on the experience of business users who best know their own data. These can then be shared across the organisation.
5. Extend data access further
Look for the latest self-service data preparation tools emerging today that have built-in data governance. These will enable IT to allow business users to get up and running quickly and open up data lakes to even more workers.
Self-service tools significantly reduce data preparation time prior to analysis – and provide a far more secure and efficient alternative to spreadsheets, especially when centralised governance and control is applied. In short, they offer the best of all worlds; business users from across finance, sales, marketing, operations, HR or more have full access to the information they need for better decisions and targeted strategy, but without putting data at risk or undermining compliance.
By Ciaran Dynes, VP products & marketing at Talend
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