Data is key to productivity, efficiency, differentiation, and future successes

Teradata PARTNERS Conference, Atlanta. “Data is finally being viewed as an asset; it is being monetized,” says Bill VanCuren, chief information officer in charge of business intelligence and data analysis at NCR Corp., a computer hardware, software, and electronics company and user of Teradata solutions in Duluth, Georgia. “The hardware [on which] analytics is being run isn’t the most important aspect anymore; rather, it provides a service. The value is in the data.

“Investments in technology allow us to clean, use, and store the data” – and it should be scalable, VanCuren adds, stressing the need for investments in ensuring the data stored is structured, transparent, and reusable.

Among the latest trends is the data hub (commonly called the enterprise data hub), which is separate from the data warehouse itself and “exists solely as a reference for the data with an overlay of hierarchies, VanCuren says. Data is “extracted away from the data warehouse in a separate store called the data hub, enabling users to find the data steward who cares for the data subset quickly, establish ownership, establish several layers of maturity, and build out processes around data.”

Leverage data to differentiate yourself and your business, recommends Sendil Thangavelu, Flextronics data and analytics leader at Flextronics in San Francisco, California. A “lowered cost of transaction” entices customers, he says, and the ability to “transact with one click empowers data.”

Investments in simplifying transactions and customer/company interactions pay off, delivering more data in the hands of the organization. A parcel delivery company “implemented sophisticated analytics to predict when they would deliver my package; they took it down to accuracy within one hour, and sent me a text message,” describes Martha Bennett, a principal analyst serving chief information officers (CIOs) at Forrester Research in London. That company not only gave “me my day back, but also put pressure on other delivery companies. Not just one company gets affected; it takes on its own effect.”

Predictions using data products will become more and more accurate, Thangavelu predicts. “Technology capabilities will be more democratized. Be willing to learn and relearn, leverage technologies, and upscale analytics capabilities.” (Read more on predictive analytics in aerospacehere: http://www.intelligent-aerospace.com/_search?q=predictive+analytics&x=0&y=0.)

Data visualization tools are boosting productivity, Thangavelu says. These software solutions provide the ability to find patterns in data quickly, and to spot anomalies (outliers and defects) that weren’t detected by automated data qualification tools.

“Companies are coming back to their data,” Bennett says, and making progress with “lots of initiatives.” Company officials are “realizing the need for having a solid data infrastructure from the point of ingestion. You need a solid data foundation.”

“Data becomes asset that is valued,” VanCuren says. “Companies that win digitize their best practices, which will become digital services. Processes will not go out of style, but will be more important in the hybrid cloud.” The hybrid cloud combines on-premises environments and resources with the private and/or public cloud.

This year, 2016, is the tipping point, VanCuren explains. “Half or more of workloads and applications have been moved to the public cloud. A majority of our workflows will be in some sort of cloud, irrespective of where the data is actually stored. The asset is actually the data, not the hardware it runs upon.”

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