[BreachExchange] The Blue Ocean Of Successful Data Management: Avoiding The Devil's Triangle

[Destry Winant]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/02/05/the-blue-ocean-of-successful-data-management-avoiding-the-devils-triangle/#334eb61b2f9c

Current business trends can contribute to the increase in data silos,
regardless of how quickly data management technology and data models
evolve.  I believe sound data management remains the bedrock of any
successful and transformational IT strategy. Today’s chief data
officers (CDOs) sit at the intersection of three critical business and
IT objectives:

• Agility: To be competitive, I believe organizations must be more
agile than ever before. Whether it’s entering new markets or
exploiting competitive opportunities for mergers and acquisitions,
organizations are in a state of constant change — and IT needs to not
only keep up with that change but also help enable it.

• Insight: To be agile and make better and more informed decisions
quickly, I've noticed that organizations are creating massive volumes
of data while also trying to gain knowledge from that data.

• Cost Reduction: IT organizations face pressure to reduce operating
costs (do more with less). Not surprisingly, cost reduction is often
at odds with other strategic objectives.

I believe successful CDOs will be those that enable organizational
agility and insight while lowering costs. To get there, they will need
to embrace new tools, technologies and processes. The path to great
rewards, however, is often littered with certain risks.

In the 1960s, Vincent Gaddis coined the term "Bermuda Triangle" in a
magazine article. This area, which is also known as the Devil's
Triangle, is an area of ocean south of Florida where ships and
aircraft disappeared, lost control or were significantly damaged in
mysterious ways. Data centers have always been prone to their own
Devil’s Triangle of activity, and today’s CDOs should address those
challenges reactively and proactively to protect and manage one of the
most valuable business assets — data.

CDOs today must control what they can control and manage what they
cannot. Data management can be very much similar to navigating the
Bermuda Triangle, and the challenges I see in enterprises today that
form the IT Devil’s Triangle are:

• Security, Security, And Security: This is always one of the top
concerns for any enterprise and with all the new technology trends
today, it's still the number-one criteria many businesses use for
purchasing and deploying any new technology across the enterprise.

• Solution Sprawl: Like many of the big cities across the world, many
organizations invest in technological solutions at a rapid rate, often
with little coordination outside of organizational silos. This lack of
coordination can create a maze of systems, tools and software that may
create more exposure than solutions for a business.

• Legacy Technologies: When infrastructure gets old, it begins to
fail. Failures generally start small and can build to much larger
issues in the enterprise. Additionally, continuously adding more duct
tape and baling wire to make new and old technology stay together can
become detrimental to the bottom line and, as with sprawl, expose the
enterprise to additional risks.

Sailing The Blue Ocean Of Data Management

While it seems prudent to find better ways to navigate the IT Devil’s
Triangle, experience tells me that successful CDOs will instead strive
to avoid it altogether and seek the Blue Ocean opportunity for their
organizations. Recognizing when it is time to make key organizational
and solution-based changes can help protect your data and orchestrate
a solid future for data management.

The corporate responsibilities of a chief data officer (CDO) used to
revolve around tactical management of data in the data center — on
premises, in the cloud or both. Today, CDOs are often faced with
managing silos of data distributed at an ever-accelerating rate, and
they should learn from changes (both positive and negative) in the
past decade before setting sail on a Blue Ocean.

In my experience, finding the Blue Ocean depends on breaking down
silos in the organization so that a common plan is in place for
rationalizing old resources as well as deploying new ones across the
enterprise. Doing so means interactions between resources in the
enterprise can scale exponentially and sprawl can become more
manageable. Solutions should be chosen for the greater benefit to the
organization, not because they are trendy flavor-of-the-day
technologies. But new technology alone is not the answer. To break
down silos and eliminate redundancy, organizations can take steps on
multiple fronts, including:

• Establishing a common data model that spans all business units and data owners

• Promoting collaboration on technology strategy across IT and business units

• Creating transparency in budgeting and spend across lines of business

The new enterprise platform I envision for data management is
silo-free, heterogeneous and agile. It includes collaboration on data
management strategy and effective and flexible management of
organizational processes. In this new approach, data should be
accessible and protected throughout its entire lifecycle, and privacy
and security should be primary objectives -- alongside data
portability -- to enable successful journeys to the cloud.

Great CDOs know that new challenges can present themselves after a
project has started and that even the best team cannot plan for
everything. Enabling and empowering teams to be agile in responding to
these challenges could make or break success. Steps organizations can
take along these lines include:

• Develop and promote agile development methodologies, enabling teams
to take corrective action and make corrective changes quickly

• Clearly defining roles across infrastructure teams and data teams to
avoid confusion if and when a challenge arises

• Developing a comprehensive data protection strategy to ensure all
data is recoverable in the case of data loss or downtime

Similar to the Devil’s Triangle, managing data has become a mystery to
many, but there are answers. Some experts say that no extraordinary
factors have been identified in the area below Florida: just a mixture
of bad weather and unfortunate errors, which (as with data) could have
included miscommunications, slow responses or maybe poor planning for
change agents.

New approaches to data management like the ones I wrote about open up
new possibilities. They can expand the “IT dataverse” of possibilities
and enable valuable data to become more valuable. But in the end, I
believe CDOs are at the forefront of these massive investments and
changes. They are the ship captains leading the strategic navigation
to ensure smooth and successful sailing on their Blue Ocean.