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If you work in a big company – sometimes even a small one – chances are your first day on the job was overwhelming. You may have gotten very little training, no real sense of who works for whom or why certain people do what they do. You probably sent the wrong email to the wrong person at some point, or failed to realize the politics of a situation – endangering a project, a goal or even your career. It’s hard to manage relationships and company politics on a day-to-day basis; imagine how complicated that becomes when you try to do something truly transformative such as bring in big data capabilities and use them to drive business results. Half the people from whom you’d be trying to get buy-in probably still don’t know what big data means! These organizational and cultural impediments can sink big data initiatives – sometimes before they start and usually before they’re over. In fact, Gartner predicts 90% of data lakes will be largely useless by 2018 due to uncertain use cases.1 Large organizations often have multiple stakeholders with a range of key considerations around big data infrastructure, governance, storage, analytics, data science, training, etc. Some of these stakeholders, more often than not, have the power to end big data initiatives by withholding funding, or simply through inattention (and you may not even know who they are).
It is increasingly clear that simply moving forward with big data infrastructure, such as a data lake, needs to be well coordinated among both Business and IT stakeholders to build consensus and buy-in around the end result, as Bill Schmarzo explains in his recent blog EMC World 2015: Achieving Big Data Maturity. Too often IT departments work in a vacuum – disconnected from the business and ultimate end-users. This leads to a data lake driven by, and designed to solve, technical challenges, not business challenges. That’s why Federation Business Data Lake is aptly named. Not only does it deliver the technical capabilities in an accelerated way to execute on operational use cases that reduce IT cost and streamline operations, it comes with professional transformation and implementation assistance from EMC Professional Services to ensure that the proper prioritization is given to the “business” use cases also. These Transformation Professionals focus on making sure the big data journey is successful by:
Without this focus on the massive changes required of both IT and the Business (people, process, and technology), a data lake may ultimately sit under-utilized and under-appreciated. If you focus on the journey – on bringing the organization along with you on your big data journey – you will have a truly effective big data environment driving real change. That’s transformation everyone wants to support. 1 “Predicts 2015: Big Data Challenges Move From Technology to the Organization” 28 November 2014; Gartner, Inc. With Big Data, Focus on the Journey – Not Just the Destination |
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