DataOps- Getting the most out of your data

As businesses grow, expand and evolve, so do the levels of innovation, technology complexity and customer demands.

This drive for growth is supported and enabled through leveraging of data within the extended business environment, driving knowledge and insight.

The business is fuelled to know more about its customers, their needs and their behaviours.  This all to elevate the customer experience and to grow the business.

+ Manufacturing businesses are expanding their value chains.

+ Retailers are becoming financial service providers.

+ Banks and FinTech’s are becoming new best friends.

+ The industry is changing fast and it’s realising the value of combined data assets.

In the previous article we looked at the different maturity levels.  In the Intelligent automation maturity level, we get Data Driven Businesses. 

The data ecosystem is growing in size and value.  The reason is that the value of the data, when used correctly and combined with more data, rises exponentially. The growth in size and volume will most likely not stop and privacy, security and resiliency become critical to manage – and an Automation Platform can help.

In the McKinsey report on “The data driven enterprise of 2025”, they highlight the importance of well governed self-service access and automated data provisioning to protect the data without blocking access to this vital asset.

This is where DataOps come in…remember:  it is not the data, but rather the flow and use of the data that creates value.

To better understand this differentiating approach to data pipeline management and extracting value from the data, we need to first understand the challenges businesses are facing and managing the data pipelines today.

Some of the challenges that businesses face today that holds back progress and slows time to value can be found here:

• “shadow IT” – Self-sufficient business units may seem like a great idea, but gone unchecked, will create a multitude of data automation islands that make it impossible to leverage the combined value of your data assets.
• Application centric instead of service centric – Each application owner will see the world from an application centric perspective without acknowledging that business services span multiple applications and systems to deliver business value.
• Dev without the Ops – Developers are wonderful, intelligent, and creative beings (been there, done that and hugely respect the trade). They believe that developing everything is possible, not realising that development effort spent in the wrong place will detract from developing FOR the business value.  Often these home-grown solutions will impact the Ops team in that it is time-consuming to support, manage and maintain – and IT Ops need to support a multitude of these as they come into production.
• Every application subject matter expert will tell you they’ve got this – this relates to your core business applications. You will find some data and application automation and scheduling capability in many of the enterprise applications that does a good job within the realm of THAT application but fails to suitably and easily extend to the rest of your critical business applications, thus forming more islands of automation.

Problems that organisations are facing:

• Data Leakage – manual or scripted data hand-offs that go unchecked
• No agility – slow and costly to deliver value to business
• Many different tools – need diverse skills to be involved in even the simplest projects
• New technologies – adding more islands of automation, thus perpetuating the problem.
• No end-to-end visibility of critical business services

Taking a platform approach to Automation – Building out the Automation CoE

• Establish an Automation Centre of Excellence
• Common platform across the business for simpler development and operations
• Embed Automation Platform across the business to drive DataOps orchestration
• Make sure business strategy is embedded and informed in all your data driven initiatives
• Integrated DevOps approach to deliver DataOps

BMC Control-M help you do this…

Control-M offers a framework for application and data workflow orchestration across all of your environments.

BMC Control-M will help all teams across your business to maximize the value and gather critical insights from your data assets in a seamless, simple, and controlled manner.

BMC Control-M offers key capabilities to help you make the most of your data through effective data pipeline orchestration:

• Convert raw data into insights and actions by orchestrating complex data pipelines
• Monetise data with insights, bartering, brokering, and business intelligence
• Ensure data compliance with data quality best practices
• Protect privacy with governance tools
• Automate workflows for improved visibility and control of the entire data pipeline
• Leverage predictive analytics to ingest, store, process, collect, and analyse data
• Use performance, management, recovery and cost optimisation solutions to keep mainframe-based applications running 24×7