It’s time to take data out of a support role, and make your business truly insight-led

As IT leaders, you want to improve customer experience, accelerate digital transformation, or secure your organization against cyber criminals. And while these may sound like buzzwords and high-level objectives, it’s important to understand how they describe the real challenges the industry faces every day, and how working to these goals help you to unlock your organization’s potential for innovation and optimization.

For me, there’s no better way of doing this than connecting to SoftServe’s own customers, and at this year’s Gartner Symposium, you can hear directly from one of them. Danish Crown will be speaking about their challenges, their huge focus on sustainability and how, crucially, building a data platform transformed their business to gain a highly competitive advantage, with the potential to change the way they approach forecasting.

I strongly believe that when you can unravel your organization’s data, connect different sources to each other, and begin to truly analyze your data, you will be able to unlock your potential and start achieving your objectives.

The next big step for data and analytics is in moving from data as "decision support" to using the insights you gain to completely re-engineer decision-making. Decisions are becoming more connected, more contextual, and more continuous, and this complexity needs to be mastered.

To do this, your data needs to be incredibly trustworthy, and your data architecture needs to be world class.

Many leaders do not currently have that trust in their data, or do not have the expertise or internal resources to build the data architecture. It’s also increasingly difficult to find and hire the people with the skills required to get the job done; the data experts, the cloud experts, the engineers, the architects, the data scientists who can identify the data and the patterns that lie inside it.

An experienced partner who doesn't just focus on documenting a business case, or simply staffing for capacity, can help you out here. Realizing your goals with data will quickly become clearer if you have a team who:

• Plans for a complete solution, as both an advisor and a provider
• Possesses multi-domain and multi-discipline experience to execute a solution, because they have demonstrable success with design thinking, advanced data engineering and analytics
• Seamlessly assimilates into your organizational culture — working both locally and globally — with a resourcing model to allocate the right skills, exactly where you need them

If you’d like to catch up with me about this, or other topics such as how AI and machine learning can help you build new business models, or that a perfectly-executed cloud migration can help you optimize costs, I’d love to chat to you at Gartner Symposium.

I’d love to help you find out more about how to achieve the next step in your journey to improve customer experience, accelerate your digital transformation, or secure your organization against threat.