Businesses who want to stay competitive need innovative data solutions that meet the current moment. Establishing a brand-new data architecture is challenging—but Hakkoda makes it easy. Let’s explore what your business should be doing to level up your operations.
Organizations are increasingly looking to develop innovative data solutions in order to keep up with a fast-changing world. But there’s more to this than just shelling out money on software, people, and infrastructure. Centering data at the core of your business culture is an ongoing commitment, informing each process and level of the company.
A data-driven organization keeps information at the heart of every decision it makes. This results in smarter choices that unlock more value. Business data analytics is a key part of this advantage—using all of this accrued intelligence in a sophisticated manner gives your company a leg up on your competition.
When read accurately, this detailed business data can tell you what your customers may like and dislike, refine your internal processes, and help you ultimately find obstacles to generating new revenue—sometimes with the most unexpected solutions. Cultivate a collaborative approach to data and deploy appropriate tools, and you’re on your way to unleashing maximum potential.
But where do you start? Let’s explore some steps you can take to ground your company culture in an information-driven approach to business and implement innovative data solutions today.
Evaluate Your Current Data Architecture
Before you can get started on your culture cultivation and begin employing new and innovative data solutions, you have to understand where you’re starting from. What does your current data architecture look like? Have you shifted to the cloud yet? How organized is your system?
You’ll need a flexible foundation that’s both useful in the present and ready for the future. Ensure you have a firm understanding of your current data architecture before making any changes. This allows you to make informed decisions on any rehabilitation efforts, which will improve data governance and make it easier to incorporate large volumes of data from varied sources down the road.
Use your present data requirements as your baseline. This informs you of minimal requirements—from there, you can design a solution that grows with your company.
Center your evaluation on one key premise: does your current data architecture serve your needs? How well does it do so? From there, you can poke further under the hood. How tightly do your different databases connect? Does your system load data efficiently? How well do your code and toolsets work?
You can also devise your own questions relevant to your specific situation.
Establish a Solid Data Strategy Based on Your Needs and Goals
Having evaluated your architecture, it’s time to assemble a data strategy that targets your organization’s specific goals. Making your needs explicit will give direction to your strategy, guiding the development of your data architecture. The result? Optimized, innovative data solutions that actually work for you and your partners.
Your overarching data strategy works as a road map for all your future data management. It’s an overview of how data will support the company, joining your analytics capabilities with the right technical tools and organizational processes to put the information to use. Users then have reliable references to turn to for any data-related questions.
An effective data strategy lets you make the most of each source, extracting more value per bit. It also encourages secure behaviors, detailing how your company will store, use, and share data. Keep your plan forward-thinking: include a timeline set with milestones and priorities to strive toward as conditions change.
Your data strategy should not just foster collaboration and enhanced extraction processes; it ideally will also ensure data remains manageable even as it grows in size and complexity. Furthermore, the strategy supports data governance, telling you how to allocate data—so it goes only where it should go.
In constructing your all-encompassing data strategy, focus on how it supports organizational objectives. For example, you may aim to collect all company data into a single source of truth to enable fast and accountable access.
Finally, the new data solution must also justify itself financially. Remember, it’s a living project—don’t be afraid to adapt as you go when situations inevitably emerge.
Unite People, Processes, and Data with Data Management and Governance
One common misunderstanding when it comes to setting your plan is that data management is the same as data architecture. Data management is a broader category, encompassing architecture as well as performance. For data to enable the innovative solutions you’re after, your users need fast access.
Proper data governance creates the framework that glues together people and processes, bringing your architecture to the next level. While the underlying architecture enables data management at a base level, you also need effective governance to keep data reliable and relevant.
Good governance protects data while also making it available where necessary. In the past, governance strategies have traditionally been facilitated with somewhat slow and now-ineffective methods, like keeping information in a central office.
As work decentralizes in the modern world, however, these legacy strategies can prove more of a hindrance than a solution. You need to pivot your data governance approach to hinge on innovative, automated solutions that meet the current moment—governance solutions like those Hakkoda brings to the table with every deliverable.
Consistently enforcing clear quality standards and other management criteria makes your data safer and easier to use. By extension, this also simplifies regulatory compliance. Now’s the time to upgrade your data management and governance—automated access control tools offer a higher degree of protection than old approaches.
Hakkoda: Innovative Data Solutions for Modern Companies
A data-driven culture enables the innovations that companies in every industry must embrace today if they want to keep at the head of the pack. For organizations attempting to transition from older data management practices, an evaluation of their current architecture—along with the development of a data strategy and governance plan—can unlock exciting new possibilities.
However, moving from legacy practices to modern data management is a complex and time-consuming feat. Rather than trying to figure it out on your own, it helps to pair with data management experts to ensure a smooth transition—experts like those at Hakkoda.
A leading data modernization service provider, the team at Hakkoda will help you take advantage innovative solutions built to meet the moment—and empower you in the future.
