The Data Management Imperative

Business trends dictate that we must change how we manage data

A perfect storm of trends is having a deep impact on why we must, and are now able to, manage data in new ways. This article focuses on what's different now, and why the need to improve is greater than ever.

• Mobile / Digital – Today’s customers, and not just the millennials, fully expect compelling anytime / anywhere experiences; implying the reduction / removal of human friction. Traditional organizations, recognizing this, are moving toward digitization of all their processes, front to back. Such digitization both depends on, and produces, yet more, data.
• The Data Explosion – The rise of mobile and digital is contributing mightily to the exponentially increasing avalanche of data already being produced. Organizations are starting to understand that it is vital to preserve all this data, including data about the data, so that it can ultimately be leveraged. are this scrambling to figure out how to keep up with all the new data introduced into its environment.
• New Competition – the rise of nimble, born-in-the cloud startups (e.g. FinTechs in Financial Services, Amazon in retailing, Uber in transportation, etc.) means that traditional organizations don’t have the luxury of bring their products to market at their "traditional" pace, nor do they have the luxury of releasing products that are less than compelling. To win, they must leverage the competitive advantage they do possess: all of their data. This is having a disruptive effect on organizations' traditional, aging data platforms.
• Rise of Data Analytics- Organizations are rapidly improving their ability to leverage data analytics for informing the texture and nuance of their customer connections
• New Talent – A new generation of practitioners; e.g. Data Scientists, Data Curators, have the passion and skill and to effectively manage data assets and harvest meaningful insights from all kinds of data, thus enabling the analytics revolution.
• Maturing Processes – Over the past 10 years IT has been maturing the way it operates; placing a greater priority on delivering its value ‘as a service’, This has called for the the formalization and maturity of its governance and processes, Organizations are starting to leverage these maturing capabilities toward better management their data assets.

So what does this all mean?

• We live and die by our data
• Our old methods won’t cut it (they already aren’t)
• Act or be re acted upon!