Data is the New Black

FountainBlue’s November 10 VIP Roundtable was on the topic of ‘Data is the New Black’. We were fortunate to have such an experienced and diverse group of executives for this month’s VIP Roundtable. They both exclaimed at how far we have come over the past few decades and also the challenges for further progressing our collection, management, and productive usage of data going forward.

Our executives agreed that our future will continue to be fueled by data – it will be prominently used in every industry and seamlessly integrated into our day-to-day lives at work and at home. There was a clear description of the evolution of data over the past several decades. We have quickly evolved from a period where executives and companies did not understand how data helps their organizations get more done, serve more companies, and provide more value to a period where we embraced the need to quickly develop the technologies, infrastructure, and solutions which make it easier for everyone to gather and store data.Indeed, we have evolved to the point where we are overwhelmed by the volume of data generated, the multitude of devices generating the data, and the need to manage and track that data.

The requirements and mandates around security, privacy, protection, relevancy, usage, access, etc., provide additional challenges to the strategic management and integration of data, and the sheer volume of generated data makes that management and integration more difficult.  But forward-thinking companies are adopting strategies and techniques to better ensure compliance with security and regulations while also filtering data for most relevant usage, based on customer requirements.It’s no wonder that today’s top companies collect, store and manage large volumes of data representing a large range of use cases for a broad swath of customers. 

The headwinds and tailwinds posed by the Data evolution (and revolution) provide many opportunities and challenges:

• Software for managing the high-volume streaming of unstructured data will continue to add immense value and even more successful use cases.
• The hardware and software solutions which were adopted decades ago are now outdated, and it will be difficult (but not impossible) to migrate from those solutions to more progressive, modular, flexible, sustainable, reliable solutions. 
• There will continue to be more sophisticated AI and ML solutions around the data, allowing organizations to better build, manage, store, distribute, filter, and integrate data for specific use cases. 
• Data can provide contextual awareness while driving, operating machinery and doing medical procedures.
• Image/video processing in public places can proactively help identify threats, personalize experience or manage natural disasters.  
• Historical data in business and financial decisions can help identify and predict market trends.
• Solutions leveraging algorithms and automation around data capture, storage, management, filtration, distribution, etc., will continue to add value.

Below are suggestions and best practices for managing data:Be Strategic

• Understand and report on the costs and exposure for not proactively managing your data. 
• Think about the local as well as global implications around data usage, while also considering privacy and security requirements.
• When managing data, consider the ‘WWWWH’ – the who, what, when, where, how the data is used. 
• Look not just at how data was used in the past and projecting/extrapolating how the data would be used in the future based on market trends and customer preferences. 
• Treat the data management and optimization solutions as not just operational and infrastructure costs, but also business opportunities. 

Be Operationally Excellent

• Policy, regulation, security, access, and other data management compliance issues will continue to surface, so partnering with an ecosystem of trusted others will help leaders and organizations stay in front of the trends and requirements.  
• Simplify how processes are done, how data is collected and managed. It might be painful in the short term, especially for slow-moving industries with outdated systems which must be all 24×7, but the upgrades are necessary.

Look to the Future

• Embrace digital transformation solutions in all industries. 
• Invest in start-ups and entrepreneurs with groundbreaking ideas and solutions for enterprise customers in particular. 

Resource: 

• Top 10 Scariest Things IT Pros Hear, Yousuf Khan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-10-scariest-things-pros-hear-yousuf-khan/ 

The bottom line is that we have seen incremental changes over the past few decades, and will continue to witness and drive these digital transformations worldwide, across all industries, for Data is the New Oil. 

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