Data: An Enterprise’s most Valuable & Transformative Asset
Data has become our most valuable commodity, the currency that unlocks business value and impels enterprises toward digital transformation.
This concept isn’t new. Mathematician Clive Humby declared data the new oil as early as 2006. In 2017, The Economist further popularized Humby’s assertion and reiterated that data had inched oil out of its premier ranking as the most valuable resource on earth. Data is the very oxygen that fuels digital transformation. And unlike oil, oxygen has no alternatives, underscoring data’s criticality to digital transformation. At Microsoft we help each customer unearth the maximum value from the data platform choices they make. This is why companies like Walgreens report transformative and holistic improvements in their performance.
Read about Walgreens, where the time to process data from prescription dispensers to data warehouses has shrunk from a 48-hour process to just a few minutes.
As digital transformation has spread widely, it’s become apparent that we may be downplaying data as the new oil.
As a data executive, I sometimes wake up feeling like a commodities trader. My role and mission is to share this story of data’s transformative role in enterprises. Digital transformation was initially limited to organizations simply migrating their environments from on-premises to the cloud and then modernizing legacy systems and technologies. Now, data is all the rage as companies continue to dig ferociously for prized insights about their customers, business processes, and markets. Leveraging a consolidated data strategy is consequential for a successful digital transformation.
Today, the auspicious use of data has advanced into a survival technique and competitive differentiator in a rapidly changing world, economy, and business landscape. It helps a business understand:
- Its customers
- Its systems and people
- How to automate and optimize business processes
- How to discover new business models
- How to augment capacity and capabilities
- How to disrupt and innovate
Therefore, our approach at Microsoft is to enable every enterprise to essentially become a tech enterprise – using the transformative power of technology and data to enhance productivity and performance.
One challenge in this era of digitalization is that data is ubiquitous. CIOs often share with us that in their journey to transform their companies into tech enterprises, they struggle with three fundamental challenges:
- The ability to discover all the data across their digital landscape.
- Driving insights from enterprise data for decision making.
- Creating a data-driven culture
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It’s my job as a technology executive to envision and develop solutions that discover, store, analyze, and govern this explosive influx of data.
“50 billion connected devices by 2030, and 90 percent of the data that we have today was created in the last two years.”- Satya Nadella
Enterprise data management can be complex. As a technology partner to many enterprises, Microsoft simplifies this complexity with products and tools that unlock the value of your data and transform your organization.
The virtuous cycle of data created from each transaction, customer interaction, business process, and analysis is relegated to fragmented segments – transactional databases, existing legacy systems, data warehouses, disks, tapes, and analytics tools. This random mélange of data significantly detracts from the value and business insights that a more consolidated data record would afford. IT, business leaders, developers, and data scientists try frantically to collaborate, operating and consuming data to serve their individual needs in a system that facilitates discrete rather than holistic operations. A modern, integrated approach can unlock the value of your data.
At Kepro, reviewing voluminous clinical documentation is no longer an arduous, manual process but an automated, scaled endeavor using Text Analytics for health, a healthcare-specific AI offering that’s part of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services.
A data-driven organization on the path of digital transformation needs a comprehensive and economical end-to-end Data portfolio that adapts to any data readiness stage:
- It begins with making data available for insights by migrating to the cloud.
- Breaking data silos and applying governance and discovery solutions.
- Embarking on a cloud native application journey, delivering rich application experiences with open source and no SQL database choices
- Unleashing the power of data by bringing all these solutions together seamlessly from transactional data, into analytics to build a strong data platform.
- Developing intelligent/enriched customer experiences by enhancing data consumption with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Successful enterprise ventures move beyond a simple menu of products stored in a single cloud to a holistic data platform which caters to the numerous dimensions of available data. Using data stored on-premises, relational databases, and large open-source frameworks that store and process petabytes of data, companies maintain a seamless user experience for business reporting, machine learning, analytics, and data engineering at a competitive total cost of ownership.
Ivo van der Werk en Richard Valkering
Priya Vijayarajendran A clear, concise and insightful article. Thank you for sharing.
A great and concise post-Priya Vijayarajendran. I especially like the third challenge of creating a culture of data and insight. It is the most challenging roadblock that organizations need to surmount. At its core, an effective data transformation is a cultural transformation.
Priya- I couldn’t agree more with your observation on the three challenges businesses and leaders face. They all take time to master and start with the understanding that change is needed if you want to transform.
Charlotte van Beijsterveld