Written by
- Tim Dunn, CEO Founder, eSpyder
- Matt Garrett, Technical Director, Cloud Business
In eSpyder’s last blog Digital Transformation? - Only if you clean up your data we explored why effective cleansing, streamlining and on-going management of your corporate data is a critical component of any digital transformation initiative. There are many business benefits and competitive advantages in ensuring your valuable corporate data is optimised to support your business model. These include:
- Reduced Cost and greater operational efficiency
- Improved customer service resulting in higher revenues and greater customer loyalty.
- Greater business agility and resilience
- Lower risk of regulatory non-compliance and exposure
In this blog Matt Garrett, Technical Director at Technology and Cloud transformation specialists CloudBusiness joins us to highlight the main steps required during your data management journey and the key considerations along the way.
Digital Transformation was already high on CIOs’ priority list, but the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted it as an existential requirement for organisations to achieve the agility they will need in future.
I asked Matt for his perspective on the following questions facing transformation teams:
- Where should you start your transformation journey?
- What are the key considerations and Priorities?
- How can you measure / assess progress?
- What are the potential pitfalls?
Where should you start your transformation journey?
The first step in any digital transformation project is to set out what you want to achieve and have a clear business case for the cloud migration. With this in mind, we then embark on a discovery stage to explore the existing environment and understand exactly what you are migrating from. A significant part of this exercise is data discovery. Understanding what data you currently have, and what data needs to be part of the migration.
What are the key considerations and priorities?
The major consideration is whether your data should be in the cloud at all. Any data that’s moved to the cloud is going to cost you money. As part of the data discovery we look at things like ‘DROT’. Duplicate, Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial data. From this we can assess the data and identify what shouldn’t be migrated. This can then be deleted, archived or managed on an on-premise server, and not form part of the transformation project.
How can I measure / assess progress?
There are a myriad of data management and governance maturity models and tools to help you assess your maturity. At the heart is having a comprehensive strategy to collect, aggregate, and process data. It also includes having the appropriate technologies to manage and draw insights from data. This means ensuring that the people within your organisation who need that data can access it in a meaningful way, and that people who don’t need it can’t access it. A good indication of your maturity is that you’re able to proactively use data to drive transformation within your business. Ultimately it boils down to knowing what data you have, where it is, who has access to it, and why you’re processing it.
What are the potential pitfalls?
The most common pitfall we see is where organisations move data to the cloud without knowing what they’re migrating. They move one mess from on premise to create another mess in the cloud. This can have several implications such as cost but also compliance. If you don’t know what data you’re migrating, you could be moving PII to the cloud and fall foul of data protection regulations.
Summary
Digital Transformation has become a business imperative. Executed well, it will deliver a significant competitive advantage through these challenging trading conditions. Data is the life blood of an effective business and data management should be a cornerstone of a digital transformation programme.
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