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September 23, 2019

How Data Ops + Data Literacy Can Turn Everyone into a Data-Driven Professional

Dan Potter, VP of product marketing. Attunity, A Division of Qlik

Agility is key to today’s enterprises responding to competitive pressures and market changes in real-time. However, most enterprises don’t have the right mix of internal processes and data-enabled talent to quickly create and leverage the insights necessary to drive real-time decisions and action.

DataOps is an emerging strategy framework that better aligns enterprises to work with and use their vast data stores and talent to drive better business outcomes. DataOps is not a solution or product. It’s a new way of thinking related to data that encompasses people, processes and technology resulting in greater collaboration and streamlined decision-making at the speed of business. Let’s take a look at all the parties involved in a successful DataOps strategy.

Creating the DataOps Technology Bedrock

Technology is the cornerstone for a DataOps strategy and supports the people and processes that ultimately drive outcomes through data. For IT, using a DataOps framework helps prioritize technology purchases and deployments, creating a streamlined approach to data access, management, cataloging and governance that serves all users equally.

IT has a variety of technology options to help with DataOps, whether it’s real-time, modern data integration based on change data capture (CDC), streaming data pipelines, cloud data warehouses or enterprise databases. The key is blending these into a successful platform that enables data access for every business user in an organized way, while helping to track access and usage patterns for governance.

Unlocking the Full Capability of Every Employee

Without DataOps, many business users struggle to locate the data they need to better understand operations, customer behavior, sales cycles and more. And even once they locate the data, many lack confidence in it since they are unsure how recent it is, if it’s been manipulated, or if the data on hand gives them a full picture of the issue. Part of these struggles tie to data access, but some reflect a gap in data literacy – the knowledge of how to effectively use data for analysis.

DataOps helps address both of these challenges. By creating a process on how data is collected and shared across departments, it informs all users where the data has come from, who has used it and how it was modified. This process becomes much simpler with the use of data catalogs – a key component of the DataOps framework. Data catalogs act as a marketplace that provides quality assessments on the data, and can help users locate all the right information for their specific issue. As individuals interact with information and build out new analyses, they gain knowledge and the catalog captures those interactions, creating a positive feedback loop on the data’s value and use while enhancing the individual and collective data literacy.

Driving Data Decisions at All Levels

Whether you are a CEO, sales professional, customer support lead or IT admin, you need the right data at the right time to effectively make decisions. The DataOps framework provides an organized structure that drives greater collaboration among teams, business departments and across all levels in the enterprise. This results in democratization of data across the organization, as well as building individual data literacy.

With team members more regularly interacting with data and communicating through visual outcomes shared with colleagues and executives, their knowledge increases and creates a positive feedback loop on data’s value. This knowledge translates into benefits across the board, from larger sales to more leads, better customer experience and improved manufacturing processes.

And as more individuals interact with data and outcomes, it opens up new avenues of exploration and analysis. New questions arise that enhance and further deepen the collective data literacy of the organization.

DataOps enables data use at all levels of the enterprise and has the added benefit of strengthening an individual’s data literacy. As each person interacts more with data, their data literacy and knowledge of how it impacts the business grows. And as data literacy of the entire organization expands, the company itself becomes a more agile, future-ready firm with distinctive competitive advantages based on its most valuable asset – its data.

 

Datanami