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The Chief Data Officer (CDO) is increasingly becoming the primary agent of change in organizations, as companies face the transition from finding data. While the typical "people, process and technology" goal remains valid, the conversations with the CDOs highlight two major challenges that need to be balanced: the need for flexible business badysis and the need for governance at the corporate level. the company.

What makes this balance particularly difficult for CDOs is that it must be done while absorbing the enormous technological changes and transformations of the corporate culture. Even worse, everything must be done by ensuring that no one is in trouble in the quest for data.

A recent study by Corinium Digital entitled The Innovation Game highlights some of these fluctuations in detail. For example, the study found that more than 60% of global companies are now investing in a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy that includes both cloud-based data and existing on-premise infrastructure.

The changing application landscape and the evolving business culture

Ten years ago, the business community was preparing to adopt the monolithic application suites of SAP, Oracle, and so on. Starting in 2008, this path quickly gave way to the adoption of the best SaaS (software as a service) applications, such as Salesforce.

As a result, instead of a pre-integrated suite of applications, you now have hundreds of SaaS applications that add to the burden of data integration, especially when you're looking for business imperative use cases. , such as getting a unique view of your customer or determining quality. a product is delivered in your company.

As the structure of the application evolves, companies are experiencing a consumer-driven revolution and the explosion of IoT with billions of smart devices that measure everything from temperature to a turbine to the consumer's trajectory in a supermarket. This sensor data feed now allows us to know much more about a customer or product by tracking everything it does on our website or on social media. In turn, this has increased the demand for data and information about our customers exponentially.

Another element that has influenced corporate culture is the meaning of the law, namely the right to know or to have access to the data containing the answers. If a business user can create a Box account or any other software service using a credit card, how is it impossible for me to access my customer data? One of the critical implications for the CDO is that it becomes harder and harder to predefine or predict exactly what the company will need or demand, which makes it very difficult to build warehouses. pre-modeled data that can answer all the questions of the company.

Traditional methods of processing explosive data requests from such a diverse set of applications can not satisfy the growing means used by the company to use this information in badytical initiatives. . The traditional tools ETL (extraction, transformation, loading) or data integration must be supplemented or replaced by modern data preparation solutions. Forrester Research offers in Forrester Wave: Data Preparation Solutions, T4 2018, that data preparation should take place anywhere in the organization. Forrester also indicated that this increasingly involved transferring the responsibility of IT to the business.

Leverage large data technologies to scale up (and with governance)

As suggested, the second part of CDO balancing is not just about succeeding with a single pilot project, but deploying them on a large scale in the business. This requires giving all of your professional badysts self-service data preparation and access to all your data hosted in the best applications to enable them to provide the required information at the speed of the needs of the customer. business.

The solution to scale this problem is what Forrester describes in its most recent Forrester Wave project: Big Data Fabric, Q2 2018, as a Big Data Fabric – "an emerging platform that accelerates badytics by automating ingestion, curation, discovery, preparation and integration. silos of data. "

An essential requirement of the Big Data Fabric approach is that it allows you to "play the data where it is" instead of requiring the creation of carefully organized corporate data warehouses. In addition, as a business platform, the data structure provides all the business features required for governance, security, and manageability.

Still in the Forrester Big Data Fabric report, they suggest the need for a codeless approach to creating data feeds and data preparation. By leveraging a data structure-based self-service data preparation solution, you can extend the creation of data streams and data pipelines to your data and to others within the organization (badysts sales representatives, citizen data specialists and BI badysts from your company). and not rely solely on elite IT developers.

However, as a complete solution, your preparation from your own data should also allow you to clean up your data, standardize and match data elements such as customers or products, and you need to be able to automate these flows. data created by business badysts in production chains. if necessary. According to Forrester, this will lead to increased agility while minimizing the complexity of managing diverse and even emerging technologies.

Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Product Manager at Paxata, is the author of this article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends.

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