Everyone has data. If merely having data were enough to make transformational business breakthroughs, everyone would be flourishing. Data itself isn’t the key indicator of organizations thriving in today’s world; organizations that build a strong internal data-driven culture have the edge.
Is data your go-to starting place to build solutions that best serve customers or constituents? Are employees empowered to use data, and do they seek its direction before embarking on new courses of action? Is your data trustworthy and accessible, and does leadership publicly make data-driven decisions?
People-Focused Technology
Companies tend to focus on the technology side of digital transformation, but this can be a grave mistake. The people using these solutions are what make it either truly transformational or an expensive failure. If you’re poised at the cusp of a digital transformation, you must focus on the people who will be affected, because they will make or break a digital transformation.
Intuitive products geared toward easy integration hold a distinct edge in an internal culture’s acceptance. If your organization already uses apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Sheets, and Docs, cloud migration with additional Google products automatically integrates them, making for a smoother transition to build a data-driven culture.
1. Reporting
Data Studio is a whiz at generating useful reports with ease. Imagine painting a picture with your data to tell the story supporting your organization’s mission, collaborating in real time with team members in other locations, and sharing your discoveries with the world—including embedding reports on any web page. Interactive dashboards, the ability to access pretty much any kind of data easily, and the very best price point: free. That’s the power of Data Studio.
2. Storage
All that painstakingly acquired, continually growing data that keeps introducing new prefixes like peta has to live somewhere. It could live in on-prem servers while you pay for space, cooling, admin, maintenance, backup, and deal with facilitating access…or not.
BigQuery is the solution for storing large-scale data in the cloud. It’s a fully managed, scalable data warehousing solution made for agility with report generation, built-in machine learning, default encryption, and customer-managed encryption keys. It gives right-now insights by enabling complex analytics in near-real-time and using predictive analysis—insights sharable with anyone in your organization via a couple of clicks.
For continually changing data on a smaller scale, Cloud SQL excels with the added bonus of easy migration of on-prem workloads from My SQL, PostgreSQL, and MS SQL Server. Automate unfun tasks like database provisioning and storage capacity management to free you up for the juicy stuff that comes out of gaining insights from your data. Security, encryption, scalability, and all the exceptional features you’re used to from Google—plus, you can create and connect to your first database in minutes.
Cloud Spanner modifies large-scale data quickly with immediate global updates. With up to 99.999% availability, zero scheduled downtime, and strong consistency across continents, CloudSpanner can save you as much as 78% over the cost of owning on-prem servers for the same purpose. That’s an excellent way to get your financial team on your side advocating for a data-driven culture.
3. Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Google has excelled in this field for longer than most, with one of the first notable achievements in machine learning taking place in 2012: Google Brain recognizing cats on YouTube—a rather handy skill, as anyone who’s ever taken a break from learning to code can attest. No need to reinvent the wheel: you can build on what Google has already done for your own machine learning needs.
Dataprep cleans and prepares data quickly for more effective analysis, reporting, and machine learning uses. Its visual data distributions let you understand data fast, and it automatically detects duplicates and other anomalies while assessing your data quality. It interacts with hundreds of data sources like MySQL, Salesforce, and Oracle and has superior security and user data controls.
Each interaction in the UI leads to predictive suggestions of your next data transformation. You define your sequence; Dataprep uses Dataflow or BigQuery to easily process any size or structure datasets—no coding required. It also facilitates collaboration in real time and allows copy creation for distribution to other team members for independent work.
AutoML lets you reap the benefits of machine learning without already being a machine learning pro. Building on Google’s machine learning proficiency, AutoML lets you train your own custom ML models to do exactly what you need without getting bogged down in coding every step of the process. AutoML can:
- Classify documents according to parameters you set, such as language
- Extract entities you define from text and documents, like specific phrases
- Detect sentiment in text (yes, really)
Aligned Technology
In today’s world, having data isn’t enough to ensure success. Organizations that take the time to create a culture that embraces data and seeks it first when building solutions will thrive. Keeping the focus on people—the people using transformative technology solutions, and the people served by them—aligns your technology with your mission. That’s how you build a data-driven culture.
