Aim beyond the buzz of inclusive culture to truly foster high-performing organizations

Co-contributed by: 

• Axel Siliadin - Associate Partner Data & Analytics 
• Mario Schlener - Partner, Lead Financial Services Risk Management and Enterprise Risk Strategy; Canada and Global Financial Services Risk Technology/Alliance/Innovation Lead

A modern cloud platform can help organizations turn data into action with analytics and AI.

In Brief

• Organizations still struggle with change management during digital transformation initiatives.
• Moving data to the cloud should be seen as a business decision, not just a technology solution.
• Organizations should apply cloud computing’s flexibility and elasticity to increase their speed of translating insight into action.

Many trends are pushing organizations to move their data to the cloud. These include the business imperative to prepare for future disruption with modern technology, increased regulatory oversight — particularly in finance and health care markets — and the need for more complex data models that cannot be supported by traditional on-premises infrastructure.

By using advanced analytics and AI on a modern cloud platform, organizations can power innovation and transformation through new and compelling data-driven business outcomes.

Three EY advisors were invited to take the stage as panellists at the recent SAS Innovate event in Toronto, which gathered analytics leaders across various sectors:

• Axel Siliadin, Associate Partner Data & AI
• Mario Schlener, Partner - Partner, Lead Financial Services Risk Management and Enterprise Risk Strategy; Canada and Global Financial Services Risk Technology/Alliance/Innovation Lead
• Biren Agnihotri, Partner- Digital & Emerging Technologies and Data & AI Leader

They were thrilled to discuss how organizations can elevate their analytics game with the cloud.

Here we explore the top three insights our panellists shared during their conversation.

Effective change management continues to be the biggest challenge in digital transformation initiatives.

The pace of change continues to accelerate more rapidly than any of us could have predicted. For forward-thinking organizations, the question is no longer “Why should we migrate our data to the cloud?” Instead, the question has become “When will we migrate our data to the cloud — and how can we speed up the adoption rate?”

The move to the cloud is not a magic bullet. Organizations will have to be strategic to derive value.

The cloud offers organizations a wealth of benefits, but the gulf between theoretical and realized value can be wide. Organizations must invest in strategic planning to reap the rewards of a cloud data platform.

Additionally, organizations should approach moving their data to the cloud as a business decision, not just a technology solution. By focusing on the company’s highest-value use cases and implementing these models first, data leaders can quickly begin to generate value from their cloud infrastructure and prove the ROI.

People are also important to the success of a cloud data platform. Organizations must have the right operating model in place to make efficient use of their cloud platform and train key employees to use new tools.

It’s also essential that organizations select the right cloud technology for the right problems, rather than becoming fixated on one solution.

“In our experience, organizations that generate the most business value from the cloud are the ones that use a hybrid architecture that offers the variety of business capabilities required in the end-to-end data lifecycle,” says Axel Siliadin. “These organizations consider the end-to-end capability needs of the business first, then select an integrated mix of cloud solutions based on a thorough assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each solution with regard to the required business capabilities. From there, they can build the next-gen platform architecture to support their cloud transformation.”

To boost top and bottom-line growth, organizations must increase their insight-to-action time.

One of the biggest benefits of cloud data platforms is their ability to provide faster speed to enablement because of built-in flexibility and elasticity.

With the cloud, organizations can eliminate the stress of a lengthy hardware provisioning process and instead focus on building the data pipeline quickly and efficiently, shrinking the time between data request and insight delivery.

“Typically, data teams spend 70% of their time on data preparation, leaving 30% for analysis and decision-making,” says Biren Agnihotri. “Cloud analytics and cloud computing is a game changer. It provides teams with the means and opportunity to flip these numbers around and spend the bulk of their time mining the data for the insights the business needs to act.”

The KPI lifecycle has also shrunk in recent years, so there’s more pressure for organizations to more quickly show data value. Business leaders today are looking for weekly and quarterly reports, not annual reports.

We want to thank SAS for giving us the opportunity to speak at SAS Innovate. We look forward to our continued alliance with SAS as we work together to help clients meet their data, analytics and AI goals.