The world is awash in data, and from a distance it might all look the same. But, look closer and you’ll see that there are thousands of different file formats and a wide spectrum of structured and unstructured data. In addition, there are also active and inactive data sets that need their own particular care and feeding.
It is interesting to note that not only has the amount of data changed in the 21st century but the nature of data itself has changed with the adoption of social media, mobile devices and IOT sensors, and cameras found in every corner of the planet. Variety can be a beautiful thing, but it can also give you a big headache. When talking to organizations about data, the question we oftentimes hear is…
Beyond managing data, how do we proceed in ensuring that we are treating it as an asset?
To manage this mountain of data, and its many different forms — – and turn it from input to asset – you you need a plan. In almost every organization, business leaders have created islands of applications and data to solve specific problems. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a plan to share the data, but rather the plan was to solve the immediate problem. Don’t get me wrong, this is an incredibly pragmatic problem-solving approach, but in creating more islands of applications and data, organizations are simply creating greater long-term complexity by producing more and more varied data sets.
From Problem Solving to a Data Strategy – the Bigger Picture
Now is a good time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of data as an enterprise asset. When a company’s data strategy is aligned with their business strategy, wonderful things can happen; however, aligning both strategies can require heavy lifting, but if you put the work in, organizations will start to see the business benefits.
To extract maximum value from the data, organizations must start by dealing with a wide variety of data formats, locations, metadata methodologies, ages, and storage media all need to be dealt with in a thoughtful manner. You might have concerns about the affordability of saving all this, and how to decide what to keep or discard? Or, you might need guidance on how to get stakeholder buy-in on aligning business and data strategies? Rather than trying to figure this all out yourself, let’s hear from those who have been in the trenches about their best practices for creating a data strategy.
Building a Data Strategy for a Fortune 200 Company
I’m excited to join JuneAn Lanigan, global head of Enterprise Data Management at Western Digital, in an online discussion to learn and review how Western Digital, a Fortune 200 company, has built its data strategy, and how the company deals with a mountain of data with many different shapes, sizes, and needs.
JuneAn played a critical leadership role in driving our Big Data Platform and enabling data-driven insights across the company – from manufacturing to engineering to business strategy. She will share her experience and best practices, as well as discuss the evolution of data and how developing a data strategy is critical in both managing diverse datasets and aligning data to drive actionable business insights.
Best Practices for Your Data Strategy
In this webcast, you’ll learn from someone who is in the data trenches every day and get her perspective on:
- How data has changed over the years – types of data and its impact on business
- What data is critical to ongoing operations and how must it be protected
- Western Digital’s experience building and deploying a Big Data Platform to create a competitive advantage
- How to manage Data Quality issues that may impact analytics workloads
- Futureproofing your data infrastructure for maximum ROI
Register today to hear from someone, like you, who has watched the world of data change, and learn from her experience as she shares best practices to build a better tomorrow with data. You can also stream the webcast on demand.
