From my perspective an effective data discovery solution comes down to the management of the data, and our platform’s speed and its ability to index and rapidly query information. But if you can build in processes that are compressed, it gives you the ability to do in memory analytics and process that information very quickly regardless of where it’s coming from, unstructured or structured, so that distinction doesn’t play so much a role, or at least it shouldn’t.
For the best practices for data discovery and Unified Information Access you need to enable users to work with the growing data and content with less IT involvements. It is a key point. So the best practice is make it easier and faster to incorporate new data sources. Let users personalize discovery and visualization. Choose tools that leverage the value of big data.
Looking at the kinds of data sources, they are growing. They are going to be important for decision makers in lines of business and throughout the organization. Establish managed self-service. And I think this is an area where IT certainly is important. To manage self service efforts, makes sure that the data is secure. Improve data quality.
Find and document repeatable analysis patterns so that once something is working in the organization, make it available to other users in the organization. That’s a good way to get the most out of it. This make a good segue for a discussion of the organizational change and cultural hurdles that we’re seeing in implementing these kinds of solutions.
Our customers tell us that organizational change is really important to whether a data discovery application or any new generation business intelligence tool is going to achieve its potential. An organization has to be ready to want to be an analytically driven organization. It has want to be a place where people are curious, want to get access to information, want to recognize that hey what we’ve done in the past has been great, and now we need to move forward.
Preparing for that organizational change or getting people on board to overcome cultural hurdles is a process, and it takes work and bringing in the right technology and the right process isn’t enough if the people are not on board as well. So there is a need for your organizations to be thinking about the people element. Some of the things we mentioned earlier are worth repeating. Getting fast and quick wins has the psychological benefit.
Seek success early, and seeing that it’s easy, and that change it doesn’t have to be hard. It won’t threaten your job, and you can be better. Those are all important aspects to plan as part of your effort to bring in a new generation of business intelligence into your organization. So I definitely appreciate that question, and we know it can be a significant part of the challenge, but it’s just like anything else, you plan for it, you take action around it, and you see results moving forward.
You absolutely have to have an organizational approach that embraces new sources of information and is very much engaged and interested in responding to the new and increasingly complex demands of their business for information. Fortunately most organizations now have missions or mandates to deal with structured and unstructured data, to deal with big data, to deal with the speed of information, to bring new sources of information on quickly.