Industries as varied as logistics, insurance, and health care rely on data analytics to make better decisions. But data infrastructure that utilizes outdated legacy systems not only makes things harder, but compromises access to reliable, accurate data. Data silos, manual workarounds and processes, limited storage space, inadequate access, and other obstacles combine to undermine best efforts. The result? Leaders strive to make good decisions based on data they either don’t trust or do trust, but shouldn’t.
That’s where data modernization comes in. It can include steps like moving your data to the cloud, modernizing your data architecture, and democratizing data for your entire team. This might sound like a pretty big pivot, but the rewards make it worth the effort.
Data Modernization Helps Identify Ways to Streamline Your Business
Data modernization can help transform your business by improving efficiency. When you have better data easily accessible from a central hub in the cloud, you can put automation and artificial intelligence to work for you.
Whether it’s recognizing inefficient internal processes, eliminating redundancies, or identifying better supply chain strategies, automation and AI can optimize the way you do business. The catch is that they’re only as good as the information you feed them; ensuring data quality has to be the first step. It pays to employ data governance best practices from the very beginning of a data modernization project.
Data Modernization Empowers Your Business to Use Data at Scale
The data revolution has already transformed the way business is done, but it’s nowhere near over. Every day, new technology and tools are deployed to make it easy to capture more data, whether it comes in the form of internal metrics or information about customer behavior.
The problem most organizations run into isn’t so much about data capture; it’s about how to use all that data. Many businesses that try to use data at scale run into problems collating it into understandable, actionable information.
Modernizing your organization’s data architecture enables a clear, big-picture view. The combination of cloud computing, automation, and artificial intelligence lets you navigate far larger datasets than what you can do with legacy systems—and provides the added bonus of scaling to grow with your business into the future.
Data Modernization Helps Your Team Make Better Decisions
Quality data is a great tool to have in your toolbox, but your real MVPs are your people. Small and midsize businesses count on empowered teams to be able to make good decisions that impact the whole operation.
If those teams can’t easily access the data they need, or if they can’t be sure that data is reliable, then their ability to make good decisions suffers. Data modernization addresses that problem by centralizing information and making it easily accessible to users. Imagine every leader in your business having the insights they need to improve the way their teams work.
That’s not just a win for individual divisions. That’s a win for your whole organization.
When you modernize the way you handle your data, you transform the way you do business.
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Originally published April 25, 2022. Updated December 11, 2023.
