Governing with Data

• Q: What are the key drivers that constitute an organisation’s need to implement and EDM (Enterprise Data Management) solution across the enterprise?
• A: In today’s knowledge-based economy, data is the bloodline of organizations. When integrated and consolidated, data can tell the whole story of how an enterprise is performing today, the business environment it operates within as well as the competitive landscape it has to face to survive and flourish. Data can also provide retrospective and predictive insights on customers’ needs, desires and aspirations enabling an organization to design business strategies that’s targeted and customer-centric. With the rapid shift in market dynamics, organizations are confronted with the mounting challenge of having to navigate through the storm of market uncertainties and ever-changing consumer and market behavior to make accurate, intelligent and timely business decision from a wide range of disparate data sources, both internal (e.g customer, finance, human resources) as well newly emerging open data from social media and the web. In addition, organizations seeking to discover ways to re-invent itself understand the value of its most strategic assets, data, in driving product and service innovations and maintain EDM as an integral part of its core mission.

 

• Q: What strategies are appropriate for effective enterprise data management?
• A: “An effective strategy for enterprise data management has to answer all the fundamental questions on how to best serve the right data product to the right user in the most reliable, secured, and ethical manner”. Big Data technology and networking infrastructure as enablers for massive data storage, consolidation and analysis are just one of the pillars of EDM. However, overarching EDM strategies needs to examine all other non-technical challenges, with an organizational lens, across the entire data lifecycle aligning stakeholder’s needs and benefits. Some of these questions include:

• How to best govern the data and who has ownership and stewardship of data.
• How to protect individuals and data privacy by enacting the right policies to manage data access, data sharing and data security
• How to map these policies into a set of processes related to data governance and data management across the enterprise
• How to build a common language for data sharing through unified data standards and terminologies
• How to maximize the integrity and the quality of the information through implementing enterprise-wide program for routine data audits and data qualities.

 

• Q: In what way can EDM help businesses achieve agility and transparency?
• A: For organizations move in a nimble way through market twists and economic turns, they need to supply their managers with a consolidated view of their business environment and critical insights on what’s driving their business so that they can make the right decisions.  Most people think of transparency in terms of disclosure to outside markets, investors, customers or regulators, but internal transparency is equally important for performance and success metrics to be clearly communicated, understood and acted upon. In that sense, EDM should be the engine that drives transparency and ultimately company’s agility with data access and information sharing grounded in a well-thought-out approach to internal transparency.

 

• Q: How have technologies like Hadoop impacted the way organisations manage their data?
• A: Big data technologies like Hadoop is a game-changer that has created an unprecedented vehicle for organizations to manage and analyse massive amount of information efficiently and robustly through distributed computing architecture. With the growth of data volume, Hadoop facilitates data analytics at scale, empowering analysts to query and analyse terabytes of fast-moving data in seconds.

 

• Q: Can a hybrid cloud environment enable a more effective enterprise data management strategy?
• A: A hybrid cloud environment provides organizations with the opportunity to balance the benefits and tradeoffs between private vs. public cloud. The Public cloud allows an organization to rent computational cycles as opposed to expensive machines, therefore realizing cost saving and improved speed while shifting the burden of hardware/software maintenance and upgrade to the host. However, the value of hosting sensitive data and applications on the public cloud diminishes with the increased risk of vulnerability to data privacy violations and cyber security attacks.  With hybrid cloud environment, an organization is able to get the best of the two worlds by maintaining critical and secure applications/data in private clouds while hosting less critical applications and sensitive data in the public cloud.

 

• Q: Which verticals are leading in the deployment of EDM in this region?
• A: Both the telecom and the financial industries are leading the way in the deployment of EDM in the MENA region. Recently, we’re seeing noticeable growth of interest and initiatives in the health sector.