BRYAN BALFE The proportional use of IT systems must be linked to the spending on the systems and to the business functions’ respective profitability to derive value from IT spending
Implementing big data analytics processes and enabling business intelligence systems are not information technology (IT) exercises, and require active involvement of relevant parts of a business to ensure the resultant capabilities meet future operational requirements, says data management company CommVault South Africa channel manager Bryan Balfe.
The demands placed on IT departments in companies do not originate in the IT departments. Hence, a close and constant collaboration between the users of IT systems and the IT managers is crucial to deploy and successfully maintain effective big data analytics and business intelligence systems.
“The intelligence is often removed from big data projects. We commonly find that people across various parts of the business do not regularly collaborate with the IT department to discuss what IT capabilities they require to do their work efficiently and what they will need in future,” says Balfe.
Companies must analyse their spending and use of IT systems and processes to determine which business functions use the systems the most. The proportions of use must then be linked to the cost and spending on IT systems, as well as to the business functions’ respective profitability to derive value from IT spending, he explains.
Further, linking the budgets of business functions and company departments to spending on IT systems and infrastructure will also ensure that IT systems are implemented through close collaboration between the IT department and the relevant business division, improving the functionality, robustness and value of IT systems in a company.
“Businesses have masses of in-house data, but are not intelligently organising the data and deleting unnecessary data to reduce costs and improve the performance and value gained from business data. Applying policies to data can also reduce security challenges and risks to the business by retaining redundant information,” says Balfe.
The formation of data policies should not solely reside with IT departments, as business departments must help determine what information is legally necessary or risky. Companies must determine which data is not critical so that it can then be stored outside the company’s environment, at lower costs, as well as which data must be retained and made easily accessible.
Classifying data and metadata early means that data in data warehouses, which often store masses of data that are either unnecessary or difficult to access, can now be used to provide efficient business intelligence.
CommVault has significant experience and capability in consulting with companies to rationalise their data and make the relevant data useful and accessible through the application of data policies and intelligent indexing. The company also has a solution that can run on any architecture to help with these applications.
“The key is helping the companies understand their own IT environments, the proportional use of IT resources by business functions and ensuring that the appropriate divisions of the company maintain collaboration with the IT department,” concludes Balfe.