Drowning in Data, But Still Not Able to Make Decisions
by Sue Dunnell.
According to Gartner, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $13.3M per year. Worse, 39% don’t know what that bad data is costing them, as no one is tracking the impact.
Harvard Business Review found that 18% of businesses connect to over 15 data sources and 9% have no idea how many sources they are currently pulling data from.
Even more depressing, 40% of businesses will fail to achieve objectives due to poor data quality.
IT leaders need to have information at their fingertips to make a variety of critical decisions every single day. Whether providing input for a strategic project, responding to an executive inquiry, or doing quarterly planning and budgeting, IT is dependent upon accurate data.
And yet, getting accurate, relevant and actionable data is often the biggest challenge IT faces.
That’s because enterprise data is collected by different teams at varying intervals and stored across different systems, in multiple formats, which means it has inconsistent levels of freshness and accessibility. Few organizations have a single, consolidated source of accurate, normalized data.
It’s a recipe for failure and the risks of making poorly informed decisions can be significant to your business.
What are the keys to good decision making these days?
1. Have access to accurate data
You should be able to ingest data from CMDBs, DCIMs, databases, and file based systems. An ETL engine normalizes data, and then stores it in an internal repository that can be accessed by any user across an organization. Business units can add key data points, or business facts, that need to be tracked for every type of asset.
2. See across your entire IT landscape
We recommend that you have a visual, interactive mapping of all workloads, applications, servers, storage, and other assets. It allows you to easily expose inter-dependencies, and edit and make changes. Hosting sites can be explored quickly to identify performance bottlenecks, rogue hardware, and highly distributed systems.
3. Analyze and plan with all the facts
Collaborate across business units with a consistent view of data for better decision making. Consider business facts, incorporate strategy and policy goals when planning, and analyze which options meet goals best. Integrate with existing assessment tools to leverage cost optimization, performance, and other metrics into decisions.
|
Basic Asset Information |
Business Facts |
“What if” Planning & Analysis |
| What is the name of the asset and who owns it? | What are the security, governance, compliance and data requirements for every asset? | How many workloads with < 3 dependencies can be migrated to the cloud in the next 12 weeks, what would immediate cost savings be over next 12 months? |
| What are the dependencies across other assets? | Which applications can be offline during and end-of-month tech refresh? | Which business units are affected by regulatory requirements if we open an office in Europe? |
| Where is it located – on prem, public cloud, private cloud? | What is the criticality level of each application to business? | Which business units have highest adoption of microservices? |
| What kind of asset is it – workload, application, server, storage, other device? | Which applications have an RTO/RPO of less than 3 hours? | What is the risk to operations if core infrastructure has to be replaced? |
| Is it virtualized? | Which applications are tier 1 and what is the recovery plan if there is an outage? | How many systems will be impacted with implementation of a new security policy? |
| What platform or operating system does it require? | Which assets have HIPAA, PCI or other regulatory compliance requirements? | Will it be more cost effective to lift-and-shift legacy applications to the cloud or keep them in current data center? |
Built by practitioners who managed large, complex IT projects where there is zero tolerance for failure, TransitionManager helps IT eliminate risk and accelerate change in any size project or task. It provides IT with accurate data, visualization of dependencies across assets and infrastructure, and the ability to analyze and plan collaboratively across business silos.
By integrating with data sources, files, ITSM, SAM, monitoring, assessment, and automated move tools, TransitionManager lets you build a custom toolchain out of the products you already use and leverage the skills and expertise you already have. And, it unleashes data from silos so you can make better decisions and accelerate change.
Ready to accelerate change? Check out how we can help jump start your next transformation project.
