Data is widely regarded as one of the most valuable assets that an organisation can have, and it lies at the heart of today’s rapidly changing business environment.
Under the right circumstances, data can be transformed into meaningful information and actionable insights, enabling business leaders to make the appropriate decisions. Timely, relevant, and correct data can help organisations improve operations, optimise business processes, increase and extend revenue streams, mitigate and reduce risks, solidify their market position, and achieve a competitive advantage.
Whilst this is an interesting prospect, data produced or consumed by organisations is growing at an exponential rate and sifting through large volumes of data presents several challenges. These large datasets complicate matters further for the organisation, since they originate from multiple sources, be it internal to the organisation or produced by external systems and parties. Such data is often stored in diverse locations, and comes in different formats that might include structured data such as spreadsheets or databases, or unstructured data such as documents and images.
The challenge many organisations are faced with, is how to manage and leverage this data to drive business growth and improvement. In a recent study by Gartner, establishing a data culture has been ranked as the top priority amongst CDOs. By establishing an organisation-wide, collaborative data culture that spans across all business domains, the value of data as an asset can be maximised. However, cultural change also needs to be supported with suitable technological solutions, that enable organisations to manage their data.
Modern data platforms are one such approach that can help address some of these data challenges. A data platform is an integrated solution that offers complete, end-to-end processing of data coming from internal and external sources in batch, through APIs and via streaming. These platforms collect information from the organisation’s entire ecosystem, capturing data in a wide variety of formats and structures. The information is validated, cleaned, optimised, standardised, transformed and aggregated, making it ready to be consumed in a secure and controlled manner. Data consumption from the platform can be done by either end users for business purposes, or else by other applications where the platform acts as point of integration between the various systems.
Data platforms, therefore, offer a consolidated data view across the organisation, enabling better-informed, data-driven decisions to be taken. They also help ensure that authorised personnel always have access to the right, most updated data at any point in time, whilst also facilitating access to historic data. Moreover, data platforms facilitate reporting and analytics, providing users with visibility at both a granular and high level through powerful reporting and visualisation capabilities. This can be further complemented with self-service reporting functionality, empowering authorised users to extract the necessary insights from the organisation’s data through a single source of truth. Such insights can be further expanded by enhancing the platform with machine learning, artificial intelligence and intelligent automation functionality.
In the 2021 EY Global Corporate Reporting Survey, it was noted that in terms of technology investments predicted for the next three years, having an advanced data analytics capability is one of the main priorities for business leaders, since it helps structure, synthesise, interpret, and derive insights from the large volumes of data.
Security considerations are a top priority for any data platform. Consolidating the organisation’s data in a single location allows for centralised access control mechanisms to be implemented, restricting who has access, to which data, and under what circumstances. This needs to be underpinned by a comprehensive data governance practice, covering aspects such as data definition, ownership, security, classification, management, provisioning, usage and retention. This critical aspect also helps organisations achieve compliance with policies and legislation (such as GDPR), by providing structure and control around the data’s entire lifecycle.
Modern data platforms are typically built using a bottom-up approach, where the focus is on ingesting the data in its original format, with any information gaps being addressed on a use-case basis, through an agile and iterative approach. They offer a future-proof architecture, based upon data warehousing , data lakes, business intelligence, data analytics and data science, also providing a basis for the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Nowadays, data platforms are increasingly moving towards the cloud, with architectures built on hybrid or public cloud technologies. These cloud-based solutions offer cost-effective solutions needed for the storage and processing required to handle large workloads, achieving an implementation that can easily scale up to accommodate larger data sets when necessary, whilst offering high platform availability levels.
EY helps organisations derive value from data, irrespective of where in the data journey they currently are. Using structured yet flexible frameworks, EY assists organisations with data maturity assessments, data quality reviews, data architecture and strategy, master data management, data governance, as well as data integration and automation. Thanks to EY’s broad expertise and global alliances with key players such as Microsoft, EY is strategically positioned to design, implement and deliver cloud-based data platforms based on the Azure stack, whilst also addressing the surrounding data-related including governance, skills, and organisational enablement that are pivotal to maximise the potential of data assets.
Daniel Cuschieri is a Technology Consulting Manager at EY Malta.
