Driving success through data and transformation

Digital transformation will remain one of the leading priorities for enterprises moving forward, with IDC finding that 53 per cent of all IT investment would be in transformation by 2023. Worldwide events in 2020 to date have been disruptive as organizations focused their energies in areas like remote working, but as a Wall Street Journal report notes, investment in the cloud, AI, and other advanced tools are now rapidly gaining steam. For any of these projects to be ultimately successful, scalable and sustainable, organizations will need to transform their data environments.

 “In today’s world, it is about having a single data platform, end-to-end, in an organization that allows it to satisfy all of the data use cases,” Stu Garrow, GM and SVP for APAC at Talend said. “From ingestion and pulling in data through batch, IoT data, ETL, real time or streaming data, the focus needs to be on bringing all of your data in and having one consistent way of managing and governing it.”

Making data core across the entire enterprise

As Gartner has noted, by 2023 data literacy will become an “explicit and necessary driver of business value, demonstrated by its formal inclusion in over 80 per cent of data and analytics strategies and change management programs.” Furthermore, 30 per cent of CDOs will partner with CFOs to formally value the organization’s information assets for improved information management and benefits by 2022.

However, many organizations are still facing a “data value gap”. As Ewen Plougastel, Managing Director, Accenture Applied Intelligence, Southeast Asia notes, these organizations recognize data has immense potential but struggle to realize value from it. There is a lack of trust surrounding the use of data and an inability to operationalize it strategically. “Data native organizations are setting the standards across industries,” Plougastel said. “It is very interesting to observe what these data leaders have in common, including an outcome-led approach that allows to release value fast and then scale up at speed. At Accenture, we are harnessing the power of transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning to help our clients develop a data supply chain – all by instilling greater trust in data and exploring ways to manage it.”

Because the opportunity is so significant, data has become a board-level discussion piece, and not purely in terms of security and business risk. “The CEO needs to own the Enterprise Data Strategy,” Plougastel added. Data is a competitive opportunity and battleground, and where it once sat in the CIO’s purview, now the entire organisation needs to take a stake in its data.

“The question is how do we engage customers, empower employees, optimise operations and transform our products through that vision so that we are able to build better and stronger engagements through harnessing data – what are the necessary tools that fuel today’s collaboration and productivity?” Joanna Dee, APAC ISV Partner Development Manager at Microsoft said.

What a Data Fabric framework looks like

In recent years, industry analysts acknowledged that for organizations to achieve automated data access and sharing, data solutions are most effective when approached from a holistic perspective. Gartner regards a Data Fabric as a design concept for attaining reusable and augmented data integration services, data pipelines and semantics for flexible and integrated data delivery. This will enable a single and consistent data management framework, which allows seamless data access and processing by design across otherwise siloed storage.

How enterprises are successfully delivering transformation via Data Fabric

One example of what success with a Data Fabric platform looks like is a global beauty brand, which adopted the concept to pull in data as wide ranging as robotic, laboratory and image-based data into a single data lake that now assists the R&I team in bringing new products to market. The solution is already processing over 50 million pieces of data per day.

The success of this global beauty brand is a result of an approach to data in a transformed environment that Talend Data Fabric enables; the ongoing use of data, rather than simple analytics operations. As Talend’s Garrow notes: “We drive the idea that once you have come up with an insight, you shouldn’t use it just the once. The more times you use that data, the more valuable it is, and the greater trust people have with it. The goal needs to be to find ways to not only use data through an analytics dashboard, but to do it through things such as APIs.”

A European consumer credit provider partnered closely with Accenture and Talend in accelerating their digital transformation to develop a data platform, enabling a significant improvement of their customers’ experience across all digital channels. The vast wealth of the group’s customer data can be shared with employees, agencies and customers with a “360-degree customer view”.

As Microsoft’s Dee said, the strength of a triaged partnership between Microsoft, Talend and Accenture is that the combination allows customers to readily and easily access end-to-end data solutions as well as provided services in one offer. “There is a lack of awareness with regards to the power of data as well as the value of data,” Dee said. “So evangelising data and educating people on where and how it’s used and managed is something that we all need to address moving forward.”

Enterprises can be certain that in accessing the combined capabilities of these three organizations, they are positioning themselves for maximum success in their data strategy. As analyst firm Forrester noted in a report that listed Talend as a leader in Data Fabric: “Data Fabric is a hot, emerging market that delivers a unified, intelligent, and integrated end-to-end platform to support new and emerging use cases. The sweet spot is its ability to deliver use cases quickly by leveraging innovation in dynamic integration, distributed and multi-cloud architectures, graph engines, and distributed in-memory and persistent memory platforms.”

For more information on Talend Data Fabric, click here.