Digital Transformation - Data Analytics and the Dissolution of Baggage Carts
- Details
- Written by Paul Lewis
I play the flute. Well, if you’ve got it, flout it.
How long is this flight? 6 hours ?!? I don’t want to complain for that long.
Show me a normal person; and I’ll show you a person you don’t know very well.
If there was a list of things that would make me feel more comfortable, lists would be at the top.
“You’ve always been an intense vomiter”, uttered the raspy voiced salamander on my shoulder.
It’s a toss-up on which opening line I should use for this blog. I like them all for very different reasons, but none seems to fit perfectly with the theme of my commentary today. I’m just going to use the very last observation I wrote down as I headed to my car after landing at the airport yesterday. I walked by several free carts and wondered to myself:
“Do we still need baggage carts at airports when all luggage has wheels?”
Of course the answer is “Yes”, or I wouldn’t be constantly running a slalom race around dozens of abandoned four-wheeled steel contraptions. The reason why is seemingly simple; not all bags have wheels.
In this day and age are there not ample products on the market that include wheels? Of course there is, but availability isn’t the problem; it’s the brittleness of change. Our inability to use new luggage designs because the changes might impact our personal packing techniques, throwing off decades of perfect vacationing experiences. The potential negative impact is boundless!
Let’s consider a second example; something closer to the hearts of my intended audience. You are a CIO, Chief Data Officer, VP of Business Intelligence, Director of Analytics, or anyone that considers data to be an asset, and insight as a requirement to create business growth.
In the world of a classic Enterprise Information Management program, you’ve spent millions of dollars and many years perfecting an architecture that creates and distributes 1000's of reports daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually to busy operations folks who run your business day-to-day. You measure the value of these reports in terms of timeliness and accuracy as critical business decisions are made based on the absolute information sourced from pages of calculations and exception lists. Your time and money was spent on carefully selecting data from source systems, coding transformations to comply with an Enterprise Data Model, perfecting the Star Schema within the Data Warehouse, creating multiple data marts with views meant to satisfy your lines of business, and curating thousands of MIS documents; all scheduled and delivered with precision. Every minute that information is not available to the operations team, a well-documented financial impact rests solely on your shoulders.
It is a perfect world, and you won’t let anything or anyone interfere with the purity of the input, process or the output of your Insights. I’m certainly not going to try.
I will suggest, however; that as your CEO redefines the business strategy to include a strong push toward Digital Transformation, the following initiatives will stress the capabilities of your current Enterprise Information Management architecture:
- Rethinking Operations and Process to dramatically affect time to market
- Changing the Customer Experience to distinctively grow loyalty
- Evaluating new Business Models to unlock new revenue streams and markets
This stress will begin in the following ways:
- Non-traditional analysis will be required to determine how logistics can be reinvented to drastically reduce the time to market. This will require deep evaluation of the “design to shelf” processes for your business.
- Data sources will change dramatically as new customer experiences are created across a variety of mobile and social platforms. You will need to figure out how to consume these rich data sources in order to understand your customer habits.
- New analytical skillsets and models will be required to analyze evolving business trends. This will require the ability to concurrently analyze the future impact of economic change, relative customer acceptance, and competitive reaction.
To derive business value and insight within Digital Transformation initiatives, your Enterprise Information Management architecture will need to accommodate change, specifically:
- Data will be need to delivered faster, in greater quantity and with more variation
- Insights will be requested in real-time and requests for analysis will be requested more frequently
- The credibility and integrity of external data will be in question, and requests for clarity will be tougher to solve
Even though I’m still in the middle of writing this blog entry, I can already anticipate the following response: “Okay, I hear you, and those changes have an eerie resemblance to Big Data problems; but I’ve told you time and time again, we don’t have Big Data problems”.
To that, I only have the following response: “Not yet”.
You will eventually have those problems and there is value in preparing for the complex requests from all of your various bosses. Let me refresh your memory: The CMO asking for detailed customer segmentation; the COO requesting a real-time dashboard of operational processes; and the CFO wanting to crunch the numbers on hypothetical changes to your pricing… all needed today. I’m reasonably sure they will expect you to be prepared.
Even though the likelihood is very low that you don’t have near term data insight problems that fall into these categories, you do have one problem that is coincidentally shared with our luggage carrying wheel-less family members: Brittleness of change. This is the inability to use new data in a daily report that is only available in the source databases without substantial potential negative impacts.
To make that data available, you now need to augment the various ETL jobs to SELECT and INSERT the new information, modify the EDW schema to store it, modify the Data Marts to index it, and change the various BI reports to use it. Then of course the most expensive part of modifying the perfect and pure architecture is to regression test all of the reports and transformations to ensure the integrity is not compromised. That, my friends, is the infamous source of the million dollar and multi-month problem; the restrictive cost of any change, however minor, to this perfected environment. It's that cost and agility problem that will "bring the pain" to which you should look to avoid.
So how do you solve both problems, still provide for new insight for Digital Transformation, and alleviate the brittleness of change? The answer is to create a parallel, but integrated architecture that specifically addresses those business problems:
- Use integration tools, in addition to ETL tools, for the purpose of connecting to hundreds of varied internal and external sources of data in both real-time and batch
- Implement an Enterprise Data Lake to store and manage your enterprise unstructured, semi-structured, and IoT data absent of a pre-defined data model
- Use Data Refinery mechanisms to apply mathematical and statistical modelling techniques to discover and reduce data into a series of analytic databases
- Present information to business operations using visualization tools, with access to hundreds of potential illustrations
- Allow for blending of information within the visualizations to combine in real-time, information from data lakes, EDWs, internal source data, and even external live data
- Implement these tools/techniques with experimentation and innovation in mind. The goal is to drill down on insight and provide a platform for research, not provide hardened accuracy
Now you know why the picture in the beginning is relevant….
Allowing for a parallel architecture will keep the purity and perfection of your structured Enterprise Information Management model, but allow for business experimentation and the growth needed for your
structured Enterprise Information Management model, but allow for business experimentation and the growth needed for your Digital Transformation initiatives.
That all being said, maybe I’m just encouraging you to buy a wheeled suitcase for your carry-on. Maybe it will help.
Paul Lewis is the CTO of Hitachi Canada and an advisory board member with The IT Media Group.
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