Charles Wundengba
To cater towards the increasing need for data in the digital era, DataOps has emerged, fusing data and operations, representing a culture change, one that focuses on improving collaboration while accelerating service delivery through iterative practices.
According to Gartner’s Innovation Insight for DataOps report, DataOps is a collaborative data management practice focused on improving the communication, integration, and automation of data flows across an organisation.
Despite many organisations collecting vast amounts of data, few are taking real advantage of its potential. Fortunately, DataOps pulls structured and unstructured data, organising and analysing it so businesses can derive actionable insights. The outcome? A positive impact on a business’s bottom line.
For example, if a business wants to increase sales, DataOps provides them with real-time statistics and insights, all of which highlight the areas that need focus in order to improve sales.
DataOps drives more agile intelligence which funnels business development processes and customer retention. As a result, many companies are seeing the advantages of DataOps.
Data-driven
The rise of DataOps is helping in creating data-first organisations, allowing them to move and face challenges in a world where it has become important to be a data-driven company.
Companies that have successfully cultivated a data-driven culture have benefitted significantly. According to McKinsey Global Institute, data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and as a result 19 times as likely to be profitable.
In short, DataOps has become key to any business and has become a central pillar for any organisation and industry.
Collaboration through democratisation
DataOps takes a collaborative data management approach, helping businesses realise the full potential of their data, while bridging the gap between those who gather the data, those who analyse it, and those who act based on the findings.
Through this collaborative approach, data is democratised in such a way that all employees have real-time access to it, allowing team members to work together towards a common goal.
So, by democratising data barriers are removed such as silos that exist between data, teams, departments and systems.
Customer satisfaction
DataOps equips businesses with the ability to provide their customers with what they want, when they want it and how they want it, faster. Plus, many businesses leveraging DataOps have seen new business offerings emerge.
The metal and plastic used for products has just become the enabler for a far more valuable and lucrative business. By applying DataOps many have found new services and developed new products, as well as better ways to deliver to customers.
Take the automobile industry, which is rapidly reinventing itself, owing to a rise in consumer demand for connectivity solutions and an increase in dependency on technology.
In turn, many have started calling themselves technology companies, as they are producing and enhancing drivers experience using technology while finding innovative ways to provide new offerings.
Delivery to market
DataOps helps accelerate time to delivery with the added benefit of agility to respond to changes in the market.
In today’s competitive environment, companies need to roll out features and products before their competitors or jeopardise losing customers, since brand loyalty is quickly diminishing.
For example, ride sharing companies have discovered that rolling out new features and functions before their competitors is vital to maintaining market leadership. Using data analytics, some ride sharing companies have identified that customers who move to a competitor platform to take advantage of a new feature rarely return.
Protection from changes in the market
DataOps goes beyond collecting and distributing data, with a mandate that provides controlled access to systems of record for customer and marketing performance data while protecting privacy, usage restrictions and data integrity.
Using DataOps for business operations protects organisations from changes within their market, moving and making themselves that much more agile.
Increased efficiency
Provided with the necessary tools, DataOps also increases the efficiency and productivity of development and operations teams. As a result, faster delivery to market and a reduction in errors. However, if problems do arise, companies can expect to resolve issues within a shorter timeframe.
Consider large fast food companies, collecting mounds of information on their customers, business and franchises to ensure they have the right products, at the right location, and at the right time, while ensuring there is enough stock. Additionally, they can find out which products are seasonal.
Solution
Companies should seek an out of the box framework in order to build a solution that meets their unique business needs. However, a framework on its own is not going to deliver everything a business requires in today’s competitive marketplace.
Solutions such as Pentaho from Hitachi Vantara take it a step further, with a series of features designed to support DataOps, delivering improved data agility from a business’s edge-to-multi-cloud environment while facilitating privacy, security and data governance.
Through Pentaho, data is searchable and governed so actionable insights can be generated and the full economic value of the data captured.
Distributed by African Media Agency (AMA) on behalf of Hitachi Vantara.
