How IT Can Conquer the Big Data Firehose

Your organization’s data is a competitive advantage. But how can you take advantage of it, if you don’t know what you have? How can you leverage it to provide data-driven insights to decision makers? There are several roles in the organization who can help, starting with IT.

Data, Data Everywhere

IT organizations are responsible for an ever-increasing amount of data every year. This data comes from many sources including websites, CRM, ERP, contact center logs, social media, documents, IoT and much more. Data is stored in business applications, data warehouses, file shares and other locations within the organization.

The truth is, IT is on the front lines of the big data firehose. They don’t have the tools to give them a global view of the data they have, and they don’t have the business understanding to know how the data is best used.

And therein lies IT’s biggest challenge. Business (citizen) analysts and data stewards are constantly looking for this data to support data-driven decision making, and the demands on IT to find the right data are increasing.

Unfortunately, with so many data sources spread across the organization to manage, it has become an incredibly slow and manual process to profile the datasets required for these requests. To make matters worse, it becomes a constant back and forth process between IT and the business to ensure the datasets retrieved are the right ones.

IT is in the uncomfortable position of seeming like a bottleneck for data discovery. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Shift from Bottleneck to Enabler

Something needs to change. IT needs tools that enable them to support the needs of analysts and data stewards faster and more accurately. They need a better, faster way to unify the data. These tools would automate the profiling of data sources, no matter where they are stored in the organization. They should even support the profiling of new data as it arrives.

A semantic metadata catalog is what IT needs, one that supports automated tagging and metadata. One that improves as more data is added. IT can then make this catalog available to the business users and data stewards who need it. Think Amazon shopping, search and selecting the right data sets based on simple queries.

A semantic catalog is one step in streamlining the data supply chain. It’s the one step that turns IT into an enabler, not a bottleneck, and allows them to focus on activities that are relevant to their roles - like governance and data management.

IT is just one role in the whole unify your data and streamline your data supply chain story, but it’s a vital one. Learn more about the challenges and opportunities IT faces, along with other key roles in the organization in our latest eBook: Unify Data across Silos.