A CLOUD FRONTIER

What Drives Big Data? We all know Big Data literally Drives Teslas, but what Drives Big Data?

The Big Data drivers are a combination of different areas. When you combine these areas enterprises can achieve new insights and new opportunities in their business. They can then add new digitalisation services and products to their value chain or “just” improve their existing solutions and products.

The Big Data areas are:

  • Digitalisation
  • Insights
  • No Limits
  • Data Lake

I will go through all four areas. This post is primarily about Digitalisation to keep it ‘fast reading friendly’. Come back later to read my future posts about InsightsNo Limits and the Data Lake.

Digitalisation

I do not think I need to go to much into ‘why Digitalisation?’. Everyone is talking about Digitalisation and it is an important part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution predicting a New World Order!

"Digital Technology & Social Change" Graph by Martin Hilbert.

 Let’s look at what you need before you can reach the level of the ‘Digitalisation’ you would want in your organisation.

You need a foundation to build upon and you must have the Digital Capabilities available. If you do not have a proper foundation nor the right capabilities you will struggle in your daily digital operations. You will end up having a very complex infrastructure and a complex digital value chain slowing down changes and new initiatives. Digitalisation is all about agility and reacting to market changes.

So what are the foundation and the capabilities you need to start your digitalisation journey?

True Self Service is The New Way. Acceptable Time-to-Market and Agility are almost impossible to accomplish without Self Service Data & Analytics. Being dependent on internal and external factors before you can add new services and offerings are simply not good enough in what is required in todays competitive world. Working with internal IT and external companies delivering new data and services are always relevant and is required on a strategic level, but for the operational day-to-day use it should not be necessary to be dependent on IT or other parts of the organisation.

The foundation of True Self Service is Data, Performance and Tools. You need the right data available for your analysis. You must have the necessary compute power and you must have the right tools available to enable “Digitalisation”.

True Self Service is enabling and empowering business analysts, data scientists and business people to initiate and explore data and offerings when they need it without any dependencies. Output of the analysis and new datasets can then be added to the digitalisation value chain enabling new services and offerings for partners, vendors and customers.

Here are the minimum enterprise capabilities you need to offer True Self Service Analytics:

  • End users must be able to add new data sources easily to complement existing data and analytics
  • Preparation and cleaning of data must not require coding or SQL
  • End users must have the possibility to add and refresh data when required
  • Solution must support analysis directly on the Data Lake
  • Reusability of data and analytics between users is a must
  • Solution must support Big Data visualisation
  • Solution must include support for advanced governance

These capabilities will enable business users to add new data to the data lake for further analysis. Users will be able to prepare the raw data and to refresh data when required. A modern analytical solution must support sharing of data sets and analytics between divisions, departments and users. These shared datasets will then again be a new baseline for additional new insights and analytics. The application must support visualisation of Big Data and support integration to existing traditional BI solutions for operational analysis. To support data privacy, quality and data lineage the solution must have built in support for advanced governance.

The above capabilities will enable subject matter experts and business users to analyse data and add new offerings and services as an ongoing digitalisation journey.


My upcoming posts about

  •  Insights
  •  No Limits
  •  Data Lake

are work in progress.