Five Ways You Can Become an Enterprise Data Hero

Ted Orme, is the EMEA Technical and Alliances Director at Attunity and is responsible for Attunity’s technology alliances in EMEA including HP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. Ted also plays a key role in shaping thought leadership at Attunity and presents regularly at leading industry events. He has been in the industry for over fifteen years and has a BSc in Economics from the University of Kent. Ted presented on the five ways you can become an enterprise data hero at this years SQL Bits event.

According to The New York Times, data scientists may spend as much as 80 percent of their time on “data janitor work.”

This means that you spend more of your time collecting, cleaning and organizing large volumes of data rather than running analytics to better understand and improve your business.

Are You a Data Janitor or a Data Hero?

In this blog, I’ll share five tips for elevating your status to data hero. These will help you remove bottlenecks caused by delayed projects, kick-start new projects that can add real value to the business, and make your data sing!

1. Offloading Data From Production

First is efficiently offloading data from production systems to your analytics platform.

This can be a tricky and complex proposition. Production creates the data and lines of business consume it, but nobody owns it, raising governance questions. You must copy that data non-disruptively from multiple platforms, spanning Oracle, DB2, SQL and/or mainframe that are supporting mission-critical operations and running at high utilisation levels.

Your first step on the journey to “Data Hero” status is to standardise and simplify this movement of data from those disparate systems into a single platform, leveraging automated data integration software and an Operational Data Store (ODS). This reinforces enterprise ownership of data and makes it available to the business units when they need it.

2. Real-Time Reporting

Delivering essential data to different parts of the business in real-time is now mandatory for almost any successful enterprise. Today’s self-service analytical platforms all enable businesses to run their own reports and manage real-time dashboards. CxOs need these real-time insights to make strategic decisions based on costs, benefits, and risks. Under the covers, this means you need change data capture software that efficiently streams real-time updates to your analytics platform and ODS.

3. Automate Your Data Warehouse

Analysts and bloggers alike write that 60% to 80% of all Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) projects fail. You can probably Google and find multiple ‘5 reasons’ blogs that explain why this is the case.

To be a data hero you need to automate all that you can and focus your effort on those areas that can make the biggest difference to the business. This especially applies to the design, creation and operation of data warehouses and data marts. By speeding the data modelling process, you free up time and energy to focus on data science, failing fast and learning as you go.

4. Hadoop

Hadoop has won its place amongst many leading enterprises and will only gain steam in coming years. We very rarely see full ‘rip and replace’ of existing systems, but rather the expansion and enhancement to legacy systems. Tools and solutions you adopt now should enable this strategy. Data heroes will implement Hadoop to complement their data warehouses, using software to understand data usage and optimise placement across platforms to improve performance and cost.

This co-existence of the classic EDW and the new data lake or ODS model is one of the most compelling use cases for Hadoop today.

5. Run Your Big Data Like A Business

Finally, you should leverage this data usage-profiling software to understand who actually is running reports and using the platforms you have. With this detailed insight, you can recommend chargeback and show-back metrics, and IT can better manage business users and investment dollars.

Follow these five tips and you’ll be well on the road to becoming a data hero.

I’ll be at Strata + Hadoop World London 5 – 7 May with the Attunity team - feel free to stop by to find out more.