Data – Management to Acquisition

This will be my last discussion on data before I get on to something else, in fact I had promised myself this while writing my earlier blog on big data. I found it very hard to ignore this topic since it make immense sense for organisation to look beyond from a data point of view. As discussed earlier, organisation collect data for many reasons till they came to realise that they are collecting data across the entire spectrum of the enterprise through disparate applications that were either home grown or bought for some specific use. The real issue started when large mergers and acquisition become the order of the day for growth and sustainability.

Merging of organisations leads to a huge challenge in terms of integrating applications, technologies and in many cases thought process. This was the beginning of the data revolution and advent of data warehousing, business intelligence and all associated data management technologies. At this point it will be necessary for us to appreciate that industry did understand the importance of the data and its use albeit most of it was for reporting and some form of rudimentary trending expect for maybe the retail and financial services industry which were the early adopters of analytics.

Like in most instances the IT industry has always been reactive in its approach towards bringing new concepts and technologies to the fore and many a times it turns out that the cost of implementing these works out to be very large because of a lot of rework and preparation. On the data side itself there is so much investment needed in terms of time and technology to make the data usable. It is time for CIO’s to now start looking seriously at building a good data acquisition strategy with an end goal in mind as to for what they would need that data and how does one intend to use it. This will lead to a lot of technology and cost rationalisation upfront and more importantly provide the flexibility and ability to implement futuristic data oriented projects like analytics. One main question that needs to be answered from a data acquisition point of view is that – is my data future ready?