Love your data, set it free!
Posted by S Swaminathan on Sun, Nov 30, 2008
Data services are freeing corporate data from the silos, allowing for its use on demand while providing security to the data's custodians. The demand for more data more quickly is driving IT departments to rethink their entire systems architectures.
At Cequity, we have been helping clients work within the constraints of multiple -source systems while making data accessible for marketing when they need it. Our philosophy has been to make data more flexible and easy to access so that enterprises can take advantage of huge amounts of data that they accumulate today.
Dana Gardner writes on how important it is to get rid of data silos for better customer management:
In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events, and transactions.
The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage. Analysis and productivity values rule the future of data as services. The [new] model is of keeping the data where it belongs and yet making it available to the rest of the world. Our data is trapped in these silos, where each department owns the data and there is a manual paper process to request a report.
According to Brad Svee, "Requesting a customer report takes a long time, and what we have been able to do is try to expose that data through Web services using mashup-type UI (user interface) technology and data services to keep the data in the place that it belongs, without having a flat file flying between FTP servers, as you talked about, and start to show people data that they haven't seen before in an instant, consumable way."
Read more on how to use your data for better customer management