Envitia’s CEO Nabil Lodey discusses how Data Foundations will be key to the Government getting the most from its investment in Cloud Services.
According to research from Experian, 85% of organisations see data as one of their most valuable assets and billions of pounds are spent on technology and services that enable data to be gathered, stored, analysed, and exploited. Yet there remains a significant gap in capability and output from this investment.
A further 78% of organisations recognise that they do not have an effective data governance process and their data remains of poor quality. Naturally this has a negative impact on any organisation from top line growth, delivering effectively to their customers, to driving a digital transformation, and managing their bottom line.
The answer lies in Data Foundations and how organisations manage their data.
The necessity for Data Foundations
Data Foundations are the building block for all data projects yet often ignored. It’s a deep technical and specialist data layer that might take time and cost without being able to show something exciting. So, whilst being a necessity, it doesn’t get the headlines nor budget of AI or ML projects especially when finances are tight. However, without it, applications will balance precariously on poor data and will fail to meet their ROI, regardless of how good the underlying cloud technology might be.
What are Data Foundations?
Data Foundations are a series of modules that will enable an organisation to align its objectives to data i.e. what data is critical to support decision-making.
The modules take the organisation through a process of developing a data architecture, data model, governance and quality process, to ensure the data is integrated with other datasets in such a way that the Chief Data Officer (or whoever is entrusted with the task) has the confidence that all the data that is available has been exploited, is trustworthy and of good quality.
Decision Makers can then trust the decisions they make based on that data, via whatever exploitation application they choose to use.
By starting with the Data Foundations, the organisation is “data ready” and “future proofed” for growth aligned to a digital transformation. Without it, organisations will continue to absorb the costs of bad data and will be oblivious to the dangers ahead. Unfortunately, this is time dependent in a rapidly advancing digital world and there will be implications for organisations who ignore the warning signs.
By Nabil Lodey
CEO of Envitia
