Data Agility: Turning a Liability into an Asset Executive Summary At a time of high economic stress, there is an alarming echo across our industry of organizations saying, “We are building compliance, not revenue.” As information becomes an increasing advantage, the challenge for today’s organization is to have business agility and cost capacity without huge integration, management and infrastructure. Large CapEx and OpEx investments are no

Many organizations have deeply entrenched systems that are written in outdated code and lack elasticity in their usage or expansion. Brute force solutions in the form of another database and more servers to deal with the rising deluge of data are common responses to ensure that short timelines are met. Yet all too often, individual regulatory demands are often not inherently complicated; rather, the enterprise is not organized to easily implement solutions and the result is another costly IT project.

The way in which an enterprise accesses, mobilizes, utilizes and shares information will influence the ratio of project development to value creation.  In the absence of a business-led enterprise-wide data management strategy, critical projects are delivered in technology and deployment silos, wasting revenue opportunities.

There is a growing need for more integrated approaches based on top-down business strategies. In order for information to be shared, it must first be accessible through commonly available functions.  Technologies abound in vertical disciplines and each solves a piece of the business puzzle, yet each also needs other technologies to complete the functional jigsaw. Most commonly, databases lie at the beginning point for the collation and analysis of data that comes from multiple sources. 

There is demand for an integrated approach to managing information across the organization. A single platform or set of interoperating services that knits multiple disciplines into a single process or function that is invisible to the user will mask some of the idiosyncrasies that stand in the way today. The use of metadata and meta-content moves intelligence rather than data, while layers of semantic libraries comprise information and meaning about the data and make it easy to find. By removing hurdles to both accessing the data and the state of the data, the organization achieves a greater level of data agility and offers the business users a form of information service on demand.

For the most part the required constituent data already resides within the organization, so it is a question of finding it and making it available for use and re-use, and processing it efficiently. An enterprise that leverages the disparate nature of the data and turns its information into reusable assets will transform a maintenance and compliance project into the foundation of a sales opportunity. This will have a major impact on the budget and boost the organization’s ability to experiment, explore and innovate quickly and efficiently.

Data Agility: Turning a Liability into an Asset
This 21-page, 11-exhibit vision note looks at the issues facing many organizations in financial services struggling to turn a deluge of data filling disparate silos into threads of intelligence and shared corporate assets. Data morphed into information will keep the business alive, but risks stunting its growth if not used intelligently across the organization as part of a comprehensive business strategy that underpins the enterprise architecture.