Globally, enterprise organisations are struggling with the challenge of managing disparate data from various data sources across their organisation. With no unified, single view of where the data resides, gaining real-time access is near impossible. Typically, these organisations are further challenged by the inability to link data for business process purposes.
“These challenges are common, but they are also easily overcome with the right services and solutions,” explains Debbie Fernandes, Business Unit Head - Oracle Services at iOCO.
Strategic Approach to Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ)
Data management, like all other operational requirements, demands a strategic approach for success. Fernandes shares iOCO’s three core functional areas in EDQ:
- Identify which data sources contribute to a single record. This ensures duplicates are found, and conflicting data corrected. For example, Joe Blogs has a customer record in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and a billing record in the billing system. Which system holds the most recent customer addresses and contact numbers?
- Identify and profile data. Embark on a data cleansing and transformation project. This will bring data enhancement opportunities to light.
- Consolidate data into a single source of truth, while noting the origin of the data.
Data Preparation and Transformation
“Choosing a data preparation approach to understanding your organisation’s data is a critical task that should not be missed,” continues Fernandes.
Fernandes explains that when an organisation migrates data from its legacy systems, data issues such as inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, and duplicate data may cause business functions to fail. Hence, the understanding of existing source system data, business processes, and the target system data requirements is a critical component for effective data management and data migration.
How Does Cloud Transformation Help?
The rapid acceleration of digitisation brought on in 2020 saw a sharp increase in global organisational cloud transformation. Gartner forecasts for 2021 predict that this year will show a minimum of 18.4% growth in this area. Cloud transformation programmes provide a great opportunity to identify and resolve legacy, or home-grown data issues. The goal of the data preparation exercise is to provide a reliable, reusable, and repeatable process to combine, cleanse, and transform data to new applications cloud from one or more sources.
The Value of EDQ
With EDQ, organisations can effectively manage the quality of their data throughout their business. This level of data management affords business leaders the opportunity to better understand, protect, and improve the quality of their data. “With adequate planning and execution of data preparation for cloud transformation, businesses are mitigating the risk of project delays and increased implementation cost,” concludes Fernandes.
At iOCO, EDQ is utilised to prepare organisational data for an effective and successful cloud transformation. Forbes predicts that in 2021 at least 67% of business functionality will be driven by cloud solutions. Ensuring that the most advanced and comprehensive services are facilitating these functions is imperative for business success and growth.
Contact Oracle Services at iOCO for assistance in preparing your data for data transformation projects debbie.fernandes@ioco.tech.