Digital Transformation in organizations has placed data where it deserves to be – at the center of the Digital Enterprise. The digital world recognizes the primacy of data as the nucleus for new possibilities. The availability of data marts, data warehouses, business intelligence and visual analytics dashboards has also enabled this data to be made available in interesting forms through business applications to help enterprises benefit from the digital footprint they create.
Thus, data is being increasingly recognized as the new corporate currency. However, with data becoming bigger and more varied (for example, unstructured data such as images, videos and audio messages, and real-time streams of Internet of Things (IoT) data) by the day, the traditional data warehouses and on-premise architectures that so many enterprises have invested in are not well equipped to handle this volume and variety. Also, since the vision of a centralized single data warehouse repository has never fully been realized, most organizations have been left with a scattered warehouse architecture, which affects both efficiency and decision-making. Disconnected data coupled with outdated architectures are the reason why a number of organizations are incurring huge costs and being impeded from achieving business objectives.
In such a situation, how does an enterprise drive digital transformation effectively? The answer lies in harnessing this Data challenge via emerging technologies. The world’s biggest technological breakthroughs are happening in the areas of Big Data, Business Intelligence, Cloud, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence. Now, at the cusp of a new digital revolution, these technologies are converging to form integrated solutions that are more powerful than ever before. Add to this the advances in nanotechnology, quantum computing and robotics, and we’re looking at a future where everything connects and integrates.
This poses a huge opportunity for enterprises to leverage the common thread that weaves these technologies together and shift to a platform that is future-ready. For example, Cloud is enabling organizations to shift from an on-premise architecture to a more scalable virtual resource-based architecture, which when coupled with Business Intelligence, is helping them also drive key business insights and improved decision making.
Organizations will now need to re-adapt and map out a new architecture, and also enable integration by investing in new tools and processes. They will need to not only understand each emerging technology in isolation, but also how they can be leveraged together to create business value.
This restructuring will be an extremely beneficial investment in the long run. An infrastructure built on this new and integrated stack will be far more powerful and require far less maintenance than before. And with such an architecture in place, organizations will be able to effectively manage and harness data to drive business success through digital transformation.
