Data as a Strategic Asset and Big Data

According to Industry experts, only close to 0-10% of Information created is structured and remaining 0-90% is multi data sets which are both structured and un-structured in nature and growing at an exponential pace that will surpass the growth of only transactional data. One of the classical example is the location detail in mobiles gets more quickly updated than the number of times one goes to bank ATM and do a withdrawal from the bank.

Around 19th century, thinking of 1 Exabyte or Petabyte of data storage or intelligence data analysis was an imagination people would not have acknowledged. 10 years post to that industries recognized the need for the analysis of Gigabyte and slowly move towards Terabyte and today in 21st century we are all talking how we could handle, store, search, organize, archive, de-duplicate and do intelligence analysis of Petabyte of data – to increase the top line and bottom-line of the organization.

Suddenly with the exponential “Data Explosion” across Applications landscape, companies are doing a due-diligence how to use the “Data Deluge” to drive the profitability and revenue growth. As we move ahead towards 2020, Organization needs to shift their gears from SAAS- software as a service, PAAS – process as a service, and IAAS – infrastructure as a service to “DAAS – Data as a Service”. The growing volume of Data inform of “Structured Data – Transactional and Master data”, “Unstructured Data – in form of files, letter, videos, images etc etc..” and Social Media Data – in form of public websites, corporate social websites, multichannel ” has resulted in coining a term called as “Big Data”

Big Data as the name suggests is an amalgamation of large, complex, dynamic data sets which in un-manageable under the existing or current technological landscape both from storage and intelligence insights overview. According to Gartner, many IT leaders are attempting to manage "big data" challenges by focusing on the high volumes of information to the exclusion of the many other dimensions of information management, leaving massive challenges to be addressed later, Big data is a popular term used to acknowledge the exponential growth, availability and use of information in the data-rich landscape of tomorrow.

“Big Data” is not one more mechanism with Data-warehousing capabilities which stores neither large volume of data or data types nor one ERP package. Its objective is towards realizing the Business outcomes by tapping all then Enterprise data assets and discovering unknown relationships between customers, products, locations or suppliers. To get the best out of the “Big Data” Organizations needs to build the physical infrastructure to capture and handle the extreme volumes of data with respective data types. It can then be consolidated and integrated with proper Data Governance to get the “Single source of Truth” – which can be feed for Data mining and Analytics and result in more Acquisitions, Analysis and be an enabler for increasing the top line and bottom-line of the organization. 

Today as the world going through lot of uncertainty and crisis situations, organization look forward to implement “Data as a Strategic Asset”. Data Harnessing and Enrichment is like Renewable energy. Like organizations harness raw energy to be converted into usable energy, today companies feel the raw data to be converted into usable data and then enrich the same to get the maximum benefits from the insights of Data. Companies are looking for re-engineering the “Big Data” as a Strategic Initiative and using technology to implement the same and monetize it.

MDM AND CLOUD – Relationship as one Single unit

As the world moves post recession in an uncertain recovery fashion, two things have become critical and imperative for all CXOs in the Organization as far as IT driving the Top-line and Bottom-line

1. How to bring down the Total cost of Ownership ( from Hardware, Software, Licenses, Resources)
2. How to maximize the ROI (Return on Investment) and RoE ( Return on Expenses)

Before starting off, we all should know the nuances and uniqueness of Cloud Computing: Any applications delivered over Internet are called as Cloud Computing. The applications are hosted in a single or multiple data-centers (DC).From an accessibility perspective it can be used around the globe. The cost model is based on your monthly usability per subscription.

From the business benefits angles, the applications can be personalized and scale up or scale down based on customer requirements. Organizations no need to have their proprietary hardware or licenses or no need of spending additional expenses on maintenance. Also the nightmare of upgrades or patch of enterprises applications completely dries out.

Master Data Management (MDM) is the framework of processes and technologies aimed at creating and maintaining an authoritative, reliable, sustainable, accurate and secure data environments that represents a “Single version of Truth or Golden Record” an accepted system of record used both intra and inter-enterprise across a diverse set of application systems, lines of business, and user communities.

From the business benefits angles, with MDM on place, it helps in generating the Golden records with Hierarchical and cross-domain relationships for all Party entities (ex-Individuals, Organization, Households) resulting in Cross-sell and Up-sell resulting in increasing the “share of wallet” and Improvising “Just in Time” customer service resulting in “Customer Loyalty”. MDM brings down the Operational and Integration cost factors and increases IT agility and with MDM enabler to “Right set of Analytical Data” helps in Compliances, Risk profiling and decision making process.

Strategic business context behind “Data migration initiative”

Data has become one of the Strategic Asset for all Organizations in Decision making process having a direct impact on the top line and bottom line of any organization. The challenges have become manifold with the innovation and arrival of social data, Big Data and data on the cloud among few and many more are on the process of evolution. The increased demand of “Data as an Asset” for effective Decision making with focus of maintaining accuracy and consistency of improved business decisions without proper IT infrastructure and systems is hitting company’s profitability and revenue.

Read more in the Page - Data Management - Next Big Revolution

Why CRM is not a platform to Master your Data?

Some people might be squabbling for CRM over MDM. This is not completely wrong, if all the data is centralized and modeled, managed by single instance of CRM then that organization might not need a separate MDM and governance initiative but Data enrichment still becomes mandatory for greater business process efficiencies. However, it rarely happens that a large or even a mid size company runs most of its transactions in one instance of CRM. Cross referencing is also a huge challenge which would be helpful in discovering relationships and hierarchies. (More pointers on the same are highlighted in figure1-solution connections and figure 2 – functional business connections of CRM and MDM existing together)

 CRM was meant to give a single view of transactional data and not a single view of business master data. An effective and efficient MDM implementation is one of the few IT strategic program companies can pursue to realize near-immediate business process improvements across many different areas within the enterprise. Numerous organizations with extensive CRM implementations strive to make their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application suite the focus and the basis of their MDM initiatives by customizing the business and data model. It seems like an appealing proposition, given the possibility of reusability on existing IT infrastructure, investment, technical and expert knowledge and so forth. However CRM systems are not designed to support master data management, data governance of whole lifecycle of record, generation of golden record across the whole enterprise and are simply not the right place to master your data.

CRM was meant to give a Single view of Transactional data and not a Single view of Business Master Data

More you can read in CRM Page....