Data Enablement: Leverage Analytics to Augment Your Business Processes

Australasian business leaders understand the importance of data management and governance. Ensuring the quality of your organisation’s data across the data lifecycle is a priority – but how do you stay ahead of the exponentially increasing information necessary to keep pace with business demands?

As data grows across a variety of formats, the applications and systems needed to coalesce this wealth of information end up consuming resources and time, detracting from your organisation’s ability to progress.

A data enablement strategy accounts for the complexity of the big data your business is collecting, and streamlines getting the right information to the right people at the right time. This article will examine how prioritising data enablement alongside data management and governance allows your organisation to leverage its data for revenue generation and growth opportunities.

Take charge of your data management

To avoid being crushed under the weight of available data, businesses are turning to data enablement platforms to unlock insights that can help them grow.

Data enablement is an active form of data management. It applies a series of defined policies to your data management systems. By providing real-time, deployable, automated and active data validation, classification and management, the river of information cascading into your business is neatly assessed and catalogued.

A data enablement platform incorporates a comprehensive and searchable data catalogue that is updated in real-time, allowing your authorised personnel to easily source the data they need for their business operations. No longer will your data scientists, IT departments and accounting teams wait for centralised data to be sourced and distributed to them; with a data enablement strategy, the moment that relevant information is collected, it is appropriately distributed to them.

As defined by IBM, the “you create it, you own it” enablement mantra pins the responsibility of new data directly on whomever has added it to your data management platforms. Essentially, the responsibility for data quality and cleanliness is tasked to the initiating entity – whether it be a person, application or business – and not any downstream department or application.

Imagine the assurance of knowing that all incoming information has been vetted beforehand, and arrives actionable in real-time, with no extra distribution or validation efforts on your part? This data-led transformation lets you absorb virtually limitless volumes of data, without burdening your staff or data governance platforms with categorising it.

In summation, data enablement supplements your more reactive data governance processes by delivering clean data instantaneously.

How to implement a data enablement solution

Deploying a data enablement system is a relatively easy way to protect your data’s authenticity, while creating safeguards for your data management platforms. This level of accountability is dependent on the real-time monitoring and service level agreement (SLA)-driven KPIs of your data management infrastructure.

If you’re ready to emerge from the data swamps that are stifling your ability to streamline incoming information, here’s how your business can implement a data enablement strategy:

• Identify and prioritise who is responsible for the data you’re collecting. Assigning appropriate incentives for responsible executives can drive engagement and enthusiasm for the new assignment.
• Entrust data enforcement to its departmental owners. This allows you to empower your workforce, while creating a barrier that protects your platform from unsubstantiated information.
• Define the landscape needed to power the delivery of your up and downstream data. By laying out the framework, tools and guardrails, you’ll protect your data management platforms from future unattributed data surges and eliminate unnecessary post-processing cleanups.
• Create alerts and post-processing exceptions for unvalidated data, with no pre allocated budget. In the event that a data enablement validation is unsuccessful, put it into an exception queue and label it as out-of-play until the appropriate owner takes corrective action. Your data enablement platform will instantly alert all C-suite and data team staff about the invalidated data, and ensure your information is cleansed appropriately and immediately.

Unlock the value of your data

You’ve seen the benefits of a data enablement solution, and you’ve taken steps to augment your data management and governance systems. Now it’s time to truly unlock the power of clean, catalogued information with a comprehensive application that can make sense of it all.

Iron Mountain offers solutions designed to refine automation for your document-centric processes and put these sheer volumes of data to work for you. This enables you to make calculated and informed decisions by analysing the right data at the right time.

With the Iron Mountain InSight® Intelligent Document Processing platform, your organisation will add structure and monitor every data collection process. Any unstructured data – photos, documents or videos – will be neatly collected, analysed and categorised using intelligent document processing technology to aggregate and connect your physical and digital data.

This AI-infused and content-driven application has the power to extract relevant metadata, and will classify and categorise your information into a streamlined interface that your workforce can instantly access. By providing a visual display of critical metrics and data, your business leaders will have fast-evolving insights needed to drive business decisions all on one dashboard.

Iron Mountain InSight® will augment your data strategy efforts by always getting the right information to the right people. Taking advantage of real-time data allows your business to make informed decisions in the moment, without time spent sourcing and distributing new information as it comes in.

By partnering with Iron Mountain and deploying the InSight® platform, you’ll be able to influence change instantly, and turn your reactive data analysis into a predictive model enforced by the latest critical information. Together, we’ll transform data science into actionable intelligence.

Iron Mountain data management future-proofs your business

Here are the ways partnering with Iron Mountain can future-proof your data management processes:

• Empower your workforce by giving them assigned and actionable data that encourages data governance and responsibility.
• Provide unprecedented insight for executives real-time updated information on a streamlined dashboard so they can make the decisions that move your business forward.
• Create new data strategies based on customer data insights while effortlessly scaling your business and decision-making processes with the volume of incoming data. Leverage advanced analytics and improved data quality for your workforce.

To learn more about how Iron Mountain can turn your data management processes into data enablement solutions, contact us today. Together, we’ll jumpstart your data enablement efforts, and create a streamlined data literacy system that takes your business from the data swamps to new and unprecedented heights.