How data platforms will decide your company's future

Digital transformation is meant to be a company-wide well-architected process. However, in reality, different departments within a company start their own transformation journeys at their own convenience and schedule. This can lead to the fragmentation of data and processes, and may lead to actions that are counterproductive to the overarching goals of the company as a whole. Eventually, this causes obstructions in the smooth flow of data across an organisation and slows down the process of digital transformation.

When departments operate in silos as they embark on their own transformation roadmaps, there is significant learning and interconnecting of systems that they might miss out on. For example, the upgrade of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform may not take into account the manner in which it needs to share data with the marketing automation system. This would result in imperfect view of a customer’s behaviour and isolated pools of data about a single customer, ultimately providing inaccurate insight about the customer lifecycle.

An essential aspect of digital transformation, therefore, is a data-centred platform that orchestrates information across the enterprise, and acts as a pivot for data governance initiatives. Not only can such a platform ensure tighter compliance and more robust security across the enterprise, it can also bridge silos and reduce repetitive tasks.

This can be significant if a data-heavy process has already been built and refined in a specific instance or workflow — the process can now be replicated across multiple departments and teams, cutting down manual work. For instance, rules-based data deduplication processes can be automated across systems and applications, with the help of tools belonging to a data platform that is deployed across departments and branches.

Data platforms are able to accelerate digitalisation across an enterprise, and are in turn bolstered by digitalisation initiatives. Old data that resided across different formats, files and systems can be activated and updated again, pulling it into the main-stream and feeding it into appropriate channels. With compute and storage becoming inexpensive, CIOs and CDOs are seeing viable returns on analysing legacy or neglected data that has been unlocked via data platforms through APIs and other means.

With the cloud becoming prominent, and multi-cloud and hybrid cloud models gaining currency, data platforms also serve as orchestrators of data across applications and infrastructure. An enterprise may use separate clouds depending on cost, priority and convenience, and have on-premise storage for regulatory or privacy reasons. Data platforms that connect across clouds can effectively become the bridges linking islands of infrastructure, ensuring that segregation of compute and storage does not result in information bottlenecks.

Because of the standardisation necessitated and often produced by data platforms, customer experience is also positively impacted. Consistent, unified experiences to the end-user can be easily delivered at scale with data being orchestrated across digital assets and services in the background.

For instance, the use of data platforms can help reduce the need for customers to repeatedly enter their details when accessing services belonging to independent enterprise teams. Customers can also receive consistent design and branding despite being contacted by separate, unrelated departments.

Data platforms can strip away the confusion and opacity that surround siloed work. Customer-facing teams are able to have a better idea of how the data they generate will be processed, or where it will be used. Data-consuming teams can have greater certainty about the cleanliness and source of data, leading to better decision-making across the board.

Across the C-suite, data platforms provide more accurate and often real-time dashboards of the actual state of a company’s activities – from financial statements to supply-chain updates. It ensures that the top management is able to make decisions based on data that is timely and relevant, which can result in direct competitive advantage in fast-changing market conditions.

A measure of a large organisation’s efficiency can be said to be how quickly thousands of customer-facing transactions — often far away from the corporate headquarters — can be effectively analysed, their data percolated through systems and departments, and represented to the C-suite in an actionable format. Data platforms are a key element in enabling this efficiency, so that the enterprise adds up to greater than the sum of its individual teams, departments and branches.

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