Data professionals sometimes focus on creating capacity to deliver and often neglect to actually deliver the end goal.
This is word from Julian Thomas, who specialises in customising enterprise information management strategies and implementation road-maps at PBT Group. He was speaking at the ITWeb Cloud Summit 2018, currently underway at Vodacom World in Midrand.
According to Thomas, data professionals have to be driven by the business case and avoid being driven by the IT-use case. "As we go about our journey of exploration, it is important that we remember that an exploration must have a purpose. We need to clearly understand what that purpose is, understand the underwriter or funder's goal and stay true to that. Most of the time, cost reduction is the core business case."
Thomas highlights that for both parties to accomplish the desirable key deliverables, there must be a clear goal that has tangible business value. "People that just casually engaging on the exploration, with no clear strategy or plan, invariably has a sorry outcome. There are definite ways to improve the exploration - making it safer, easier and more successful. Companies must focus and prioritise on business-use cases that cannot be accomplished in the traditional paradigm."
As a start-off point, he suggested that companies adopt a bi-modal mindset. By definition, bimodal IT manages two separate modes of IT delivery, a traditional, safe and accurate system, as well as a second more exploratory, agile, and speedy one.
"Today, there is a real risk that companies will grow their big data footprint erratically - one department or team at a time - based on one individual requirement at a time. The problem this creates is different travelling speeds, storage levels as well as different part within the various departments of one company.
"By implementing a bi-modal mindset, one strikes a balance between IT as well as the various departments of the company. The key is to be flexible, to walk closely with business, couple the mindset, with a disciplined, agile delivery approach and in this way, one can break the big data exploration journey down into multiple short, quick journeys, giving you the flexibility to rapidly change direction as you require," he noted.
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