Why Investing in Your Data Strategy Is Investing in Growth
Take the complexity out of your data estate with Slalom and Microsoft
In part one of this three-part series on thriving in turbulence with Slalom and Microsoft, we explored ways you can optimize your spending on cloud services to realize considerable savings. We discussed this as a smart option for cutting costs — one that promotes long-term growth and the overall health of your organization — rather than going for quick fixes that could hurt you in the long run. This is the same approach you need to take when making investments in the future of your business. If you think we’re stating the obvious, consider this statistic from Gartner:
“Only 6% of organizations consistently invest in growth opportunities without creating excessive complexity. Because of the premium many organizations and their investors place on top-line growth, executive leaders tend to have a blind spot when it comes to complexity.”
This complexity, according to Gartner, is a major cause of increasing overhead costs. If you’ve just managed to eradicate some unnecessary costs by optimizing your cloud services spend, you don’t want to make the mistake of bringing complexity and costs back into your business with unwise investments.
With all the uncertainty we’re currently facing, your priority may be to put away any savings you’ve realized into reserve or emergency funds. But if you are in a position to reinvest those savings, we’ve got some recommendations for where that money can be directed so it will reduce, rather than increase, complexity in your organization and deliver even more benefits to your business.
Complexity … it’s complicated
We’re not trying to point any fingers or make judgments here. Much of the complexity organizations face today isn’t necessarily a product of short-sighted decision-making or a lack of planning. Sometimes, in the process of doing what’s right for the business and ramping up vital initiatives, there’s a disconnect between the initiative’s goal and the execution. It’s very much like when you move into your first house or apartment, and the empty interior is a blank slate waiting for you to make it into the perfect home. If you don’t take a strategic approach and stick to a plan, you could end up filling the space with items that don’t go well together, create clutter, and result in a less-than-homey feel.
This is exactly what’s happened to many organizations when it comes to their data estates. Leaders have been told for years that they must make their businesses more data driven. But often they’re not being told how to do that successfully. So what do they do? Just like we sometimes fill our homes with items we don’t really need — because maybe we were told they were essential for our happiness — businesses have been ingesting more and more data, but often without a plan for how to use it.
“For sure companies are ‘data richer,’ having exponentially more data at their disposal. But they are still information poor, even as leaders have implemented a wide array of programs aimed at exploiting data. Most still struggle to build data into their business strategies and, conversely, to align their data efforts to the needs of the business.” — Harvard Business Review, Use Data to Accelerate Your Business Strategy, March 2020
What’s the result of this struggle? More complexity and a lack of real business value being derived from all the data collection efforts, but also some alarming impacts on your teams.
“IT teams grapple with an ever-increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data, which pours in from sources like apps and IoT devices. At the same time, business teams can’t access, understand, trust, and work with the data that matters most to them.” — CIO, What Stands Between IT and Business Success? Data Complexity, June 2022
Better alignment between your goals and the tools and teams that will get you to those goals is imperative, but it’s also one of the hardest parts of a successful data initiative. Working with partners like Slalom and Microsoft can bring much-needed expertise to your project to help you achieve that alignment.
Create a modern culture of data with Slalom and Microsoft
To drive out the unwanted complexity, you’ve got to take a holistic approach, because complexity can exist at every level in your organization — in your processes, your teams, your tools, your culture, and probably also in places you never thought to look for it. Slalom addresses all these areas when we work with clients to modernize their data practices, from setting the initial vision and making it a shared goal across the organization to ensuring your teams have the tools and skills they need to be successful.
Download our whitepaper to learn how Slalom and Microsoft customers are driving complexity out of their businesses.
To start with your data foundation — the tool for ingesting, storing, and preparing your data so that it provides the information that will result in real business value — Microsoft Azure Synapse provides an all-in-one solution. This means you only need a single tool for multiple purposes (data storage, data compute, and data science) and user types (data analysts, data scientists, and casual data users), which already cuts down on complexity versus organizations that employ a variety of niche tools. Azure Synapse also delivers benefits such as:
- Streamlining the way you work across data types: structured, unstructured, and semi-structured.
- Cutting down on the cost involved in purchasing and maintaining different tools for different purposes and types of users.
- Increasing trust in a “single source of truth” when your data isn’t housed in multiple, siloed locations.
- Simplifying data security efforts with a streamlined data landscape.
- Promoting better alignment across your organization, as everyone is accessing the same data in the same tool set.
By cutting all the complexity and creating a data estate you can trust, that’s accessible, and that lends itself to the discovery of vital insights, you can make that leap from “data rich” to “information rich,” which is where the real value lies. This can be accomplished with Microsoft Dynamics 365, which provides “a connected view of data intelligence on customer records, transactions, behaviors and preferences, along with … predictive insight tools for decision-makers.” Microsoft Power BI, which integrates seamlessly with all the tools across your Microsoft landscape, can help you visualize and work with the data in ways that will help inform your decisions. Whatever your data needs, Microsoft provides tools that promote trust, ease of use, and simplicity, which simply can’t be achieved with a more disparate landscape of data management technologies.
Invest thoughtfully, not reactively
A successful investment strategy requires holistic thinking. What are the areas of opportunity? What are your broader goals and more targeted objectives as they relate to those opportunities? In many cases, you may be aware that certain processes or functions aren’t as efficient as they should be, but discovering the issues at the heart of the inefficiencies may not be that easy, especially if those processes and functions span departments, teams, geographical locations, languages, and cultures.
Partnering with Slalom and Microsoft can help you bridge any divides so you can gain a thorough understanding of where your opportunities lie. By analyzing your current organizational structure, processes, and the technologies you’re using to support your processes, we can help you find the best path forward. And we do so in a way that makes your people a priority and keeps them engaged throughout the process. We’ll discuss this more in the third and final installment of this series.
In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the opportunities available when you take an intelligent approach to doing more with less, download our whitepaper. Or contact Slalom directly when you’re ready to explore how eliminating complexity can set you up for future success.
Slalom is a global consulting firm helping people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
