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It's not a secret that data drives success. The path to data-driven growth begins with proficient data onboarding.
In brief
- Many organizations face challenges with data onboarding due to tech and organizational shortfalls.
- Shortfalls in data onboarding can prevent leadership from accessing the actionable data needed to drive growth.
It’s no secret that an organization’s ability to leverage data is a key factor in its ability to grow. Leaders understand that data is a powerful tool and that proficient use of data can improve business operations, strengthen marketing efforts and enhance customer service. Because optimizing data onboarding speeds time to market and foster greater workforce efficiency, data is a key factor for driving overall business growth. But several challenges stand in the way of successful data onboarding. If your organization is embarking on a data onboarding transformation journey or is considering one, here are five important factors to consider.
1. The data landscape is increasingly challenging
At any given moment, businesses are presented with massive volumes of data from multitudes of sources in different formats. Aligning, integrating and making sense of that data is beyond the capabilities of many organizations’ technology and people capabilities. Determining data quality is another pernicious challenge and one that carries great potential consequences. Overlooking inaccuracies and inconsistencies of important data can catastrophically impact data analysis and decision-making. Additionally, failure to verify the relevancy and completeness of onboarded data can likewise lead to incorrect analyses and misinformed decisions.
2. Difficulty of implementing cloud-based systems at scale
It can be time-consuming for organizations to move their data from legacy and external sources into a cloud storage and analytics platform. Working with clients, it’s common to hear about lags and challenges related to transferring data. It’s possible to enable faster data onboarding through a unified control panel and finding scalable solutions that can be customized and modified according to the changing needs of a business, especially in the context of cloud environments. A scalable solution that brings governance by design into the technologies together in one common platform reduces delivery timelines and simplifies tech stack management.
3. Widespread inefficiency from decentralized technologies
Most businesses use an array of separate tools for tasks like data ingestion and governance that would be better served by a single, unified tool. Using a hodgepodge of tech tools for these functions can cause inefficiencies and create a potential risk of mismanaged data. Because unified approach to data management is crucial in today's diverse and wide-ranging data environments, a solution that manages data ingestion and governance from various data sources into one platform can not only simplify tech stack management but also increase overall efficiency.
4. Overreliance on manual processes and lack of automation
Successful data onboarding is characterized by efficiency. All too often, organizations create needless complications by failing to create reusable, standardized data onboarding procedures. As a result, every time the organization encounters a new data source, they need to start from scratch for how they can extract its data. Generally, the organization will hastily assemble an ad hoc data onboarding approach heavily dependent on manual effort from its workforce. This entails considerable time and effort and poses significant opportunity cost when you consider that your staff’s time and energy would be far more effective when deployed elsewhere. Instead of reinventing the wheel over and over to accommodate new data sources, organizations could deploy template-driven, unified automated processes that can significantly reduce manual effort, accelerate delivery timelines and enhance a business's data management and analysis while reducing the potential for human error.
5. High licensing costs
While any data onboarding initiative should focus on cost-effectiveness, cost containment becomes a challenge as many data management platforms require recurring licensing fees and expenses can mount when the system needs to be upgraded or adapted. The monthly fees required to operate onboarding platforms can appear to be an acceptable trade-off considering the value that improved data onboarding can provide, but when low or no-fee solutions of comparable or even superior value are available, the fees are unnecessary and avoidable.
Summary
While data is crucial for growth, organizations often struggle to onboard data successfully. A few best practices can introduce new efficiencies to the onboarding process.