Today, there are digital solutions that make it possible to aggregate and/or gather data in real-time. With these tools, companies can react and make decisions based on many elements, based on qualified data. For those who have risen to this challenge, the question is whether they have managed to achieve their goal and what aspects needed to be modernised, refined and optimised. But before you get there, do you know if you’re making optimal use of your company’s data?
Data at the heart of business performance
The data accumulated within an organisation represents a gold mine for those who know how to exploit it skillfully. The challenges for companies are therefore to deploy the appropriate technological solutions in order to take advantage of the potential offered by data.
Relevant exploitation of data leads to an immense field of possibilities. Using quality data brings out trends in the company’s industry, improves the customer and employee experience, predicts the impact of a new service or product, helps strengthen new ideas or strengthens the relationship with suppliers.
According to MicroStrategy, about 94% of companies believe that data and analysis will be critical to their business growth and digital transformation in the coming years.
By opting for “data-driven” governance, the company can accelerate its development and, by the same token, become more efficient in the acquisition of new customers. It even becomes more efficient and convincing in order to bring its customers to more profitable services. It should be noted that the use of data is not only used to optimize management decision-making. It can be used by all departments of an organisation.
Are you using your data properly?
The Global Data Protection Index (published by Dell EMC in 2019) shows that between 2016 and 2018, the volume of data increased by 701% in France, from 1.4 PB (petabytes) to 11.22 PB.
According to IDC, continued data growth is expected to continue at an average rate of 26% per year by 2024. We see that companies have a lot of data at their disposal, but often they do not exploit it well enough because they are not sufficiently aware of the existence of this data or its value for the company.
However, as the Capgemini Research Institute report indicates, companies that master the use of their data record financial performance that is significantly superior to others, achieving more than 70% in revenue gains per employee and 22% in terms of profitability.
One of the challenges for organisations is to identify data, list it, consolidate it and refine it so that it really benefits the company. With this in mind, companies face a major challenge: to be able to identify the golden data, the data repositories in the company in order to then be able to distribute them within the organisation.
So the question is : do you have a single repository of data for the company or do you have several? Indeed, we often see the presence of data silos, that is to say data sets accessible only to a part of the company and isolated from the rest of the organisation.
We thus have data that is sometimes unidentified, that is not shared with all the departments of the company, that is not known to the IT department (Shadow IT), just as we can have duplicate data, different levels of data quality, a lack of visibility to which is added a lack of control of the data.
Companies are therefore faced with two major projects:
- at the organisational level: understand the issues, the value and federate the teams to ensure optimal governance;
- at the technical level: allow the mapping, consolidation and refinement of the data.
The implementation of a data platform via Business Intelligence in particular becomes necessary.
Data visualisation and analysis: what have you put in place?
At Devoteam M Cloud, our consultants sometimes observe situations in clients that question companies’ data management practices.
Often, we have reports specific to each department with sometimes other tools than those pushed by the company. Reports that have the same goals, but where each department has different reports on different tools.
For example, it is not uncommon for the same company to see that marketing and IT each have their own Power BI reports, while the purpose of these reports is the same.
This results in data that is not refined and even less homogenised. In this context, we have a data repository that is not the same within the company and this has several consequences:
- a lack of internal communication due to different language and a lack of coordination between departments,
- additional costs, because we then need different know-how since we constantly reinvent the wheel,
- a problem of coherence in the company because not being on the same data repository or the same data processing assumptions, we can end up with contradictory reports on the same subjects.
The implementation of an Intel business platform like Power BI should improve and facilitate the visualisation and analysis of data to make better decisions and improve business performance.
However, the latter must ensure overall consistency within its organisation by federating the teams around a common language and a single data repository shared by the different departments.
Governance, security and compliance of your data: where are you?
Entrepreneurs need to adopt true data governance to prevent the risks associated with access to their sensitive information. Similarly, they must meet the regulatory requirements of the GDPR.
Sensitivity to these compliance and security issues varies greatly from one company to another, although the general dynamics due in particular to cyberattacks and the pressure around the GDPR mean that more and more companies are now sensitive to these issues. In terms of GDPR, it is essential to set up a data management policy that a Data Protection Officer (DPO) is responsible for applying. The latter ensures compliance with the GDPR in terms of security, confidentiality and traceability of personal information.
The role of Devoteam M Cloud is obviously to comply with the company’s security plans, to raise awareness and to recommend a concrete solution. To do this, our consultants work with the DPO and the CISO to offer a solid and sustainable solution at this level.
Thus, data remains a fundamental issue for companies. It is even perceived as a key asset of competitiveness in the market. To unlock the full potential of a company, it requires a technical, digital, cultural and organisational transformation of all departments.
