In part one of this blog series I contrasted technology predictions (less than sure projections of the future) so prevalent at the start of every year with sure technology bets (those things you can be 100% sure will happen). The goal of this distinction was to help you understand how to improve the payouts from your technology bets.
In part two, I provided my list of 10 sure bet technology trends you can count on to continue in 2020. With data the common denominator across all of them, I concluded that investing in your data was certainly your wisest bet.
Continuing the Las Vegas theme, in this blog I identify an unbeatable hand that you can use to increase your odds of winning at the data game. Spanning people, processes, technology and architecture, these combine to guide your data management efforts so you can tap the power of data and deliver the business transformations you need to thrive in 2020 and beyond.
Winning with Four Aces
You don’t need to be a Las Vegas sharpie to know that four aces is nearly always a winning hand in five card stud poker. The problem is the odds of getting four aces are pretty slim. In fact you have just a 1 in 54,145 chance when dealt five cards randomly.
But unlike poker, when it comes to the 10 data opportunities listed in part two, your hand does not have to be the random result of five cards slid across the table by your dealer.
Instead you can deal yourself these four aces.
Your First Ace: Adaptive Data Architecture
As your data grows, becomes more real-time, distributes more widely, and shifts toward the cloud, you may end up with an accidental data architecture that constrains rather than enables your business objectives.
Your winning hand includes an adaptive data architecture ace that:
- Embraces today’s distributed data topology rather than trying to apply traditional data centralization paradigms. Logical Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data-as-a-Service, and Data Layer are typical labels.
- Leverages what you already have, avoiding rip and replace. Have a data warehouse for your historical analysis? Keep it. Adding a data lake for your data scientists? Include it. Migrating data from on-premises to the cloud? Redirect it.
- Decouples how you manage data from how you consume it. Your business users no longer need to know IT internals such as schemas and syntax. And your IT team is free to manage each data type optimally, independent from how they choose to provision it to the business.
- Starts small so you can quickly deliver value. Then grows when you are ready to take on broader efforts such as standardizing your enterprise data model or scaling to support larger user counts and stricter SLAs.
Your Second Ace: Agile Methods
Data fuels customer intimacy, operational excellence, and business reinvention. And in today’s data-driven world, victory goes to the swift.
Your winning hand includes an agile methods ace that:
- Leverages data virtualization so you can quickly configure new datasets in hours or days, avoiding the complex software development lifecycle (SDLC) and long time-to-solution associated with ETL and data warehousing.
- Allows you to focus on your highest-return data management activities instead of boiling the ocean. For example, controlling master or reference data for a few key domains, then circling back later for less critical domains.
- Supports both “Mode 1” industrial IT projects and “Mode 2” experiments so you can deliver the best of both worlds.
Two More Aces and a Wild Card to Complete Your Winning Hand
In my final blog of this series, I will add two more aces and a wild card to your hand. So get your 2020 wagers ready.
