There are four kinds of information in the world — what we know, what we think we know, what we know we don’t know, and what we don’t even know we don’t know. Traditional data warehousing falls mostly in the first category — perhaps the greatest value is in the latter. I want to help businesses, agencies and organizations understand the eye-opening “gee, I had no idea” insights that open our minds to a different way of looking at the world and improving the business and mission.
There are several business realities that we miss in the IT discussion. There is not funding available to buy the things we need to do the things we need to do. Any CIO who thinks their job is to own an IT infrastructure is in the wrong business — the CIO’s job is to ensure data is used to improve the business or mission of the organization. IT is a support function — if not used to improve the bottom-line, you’re wasting money. Today’s C-suite leaders recognize that owning an IT infrastructure is not a core competency of their business and acquiring an infrastructure becomes less palatable unless the result directly contributes to improving the business or mission.
Leveraging data points across the enterprise improves corporate decisions by providing greater context and far better understanding of the relationships between functions. There are likely whole groups of data assets outside the corporate relational database firewalls, however, analyzing ALL the data could mean expanding the infrastructure. I want to help companies discover new insights into how the business runs by analyzing all the data available to them — inside the corporate firewall and outside the kingdom — to be more efficient, customer-friendly, bottom-line invested. Figuring out how to leverage someone else’s technology infrastructure is smart business.
The Internet of Things, Cloud, Big Data, new technology — all provide business opportunity to improve efficiencies, effectiveness, and mission. You need a data risk assessment to understand how you use data now and in the future and how its support infrastructure fits your strategic vision and corporate objectives. If your IT team is more concerned about building an IT kingdom and their shiny new data center technology, it may be time to re-assess how, where, and why the IT group functions in the first place.
Owning an IT infrastructure depends on how much, how big, how in-depth, how critical, complex and sensitive the data is that you need to make decisions. You may not want trade secrets and your intellectual secret sauce in a cloud run and maintained by somebody else unless they can guarantee the same support, availability, and security of your in-house team. On the other hand, you want to put your data where business improvements gets done best and at least cost.
I am passionate about helping defense and business teams discover data insights to improve their business and mission and equally passionate about building customer relationships, finding the right challenge points, and presenting clear alternatives to improve mission effectiveness at less cost in shorter timeframes. If you want help considering the options, laying out a framework, or determining where to start, please let me know how I can assist.
Follow me on Twitter: Dennis Drayer@dldc_LLC
You can contact me at dennis.drayer@sbcglobal.net or directly at 937.304.3989.
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