Data can be extremely valuable to your organization. If you know how to turn that data into analyses and insights. Preferably in such a way that your entire organization can use it. But that can be quite challenging. Discover three challenges that often occur when unlocking the value in your data. And why a business data fabric can be the solution.
Customer interactions, sales figures, marketing campaign results and inventory data – all business data that can represent significant value to your organization. With the insights you gain from this data, you can make informed decisions that positively impact your organization’s performance. These basic concepts need no further explanation. Yet some organizations still struggle with unlocking the value in their data. Why is that so?
To realize the value of your enterprise data, you need both easy and controlled access to it. And that’s easier said than done. Here are three common challenges that organizations face in accessing their data.
1 – Data for the whole organization.
Data can be valuable to all employees in your organization, from logistics staff to marketers to management. It is therefore crucial to make data accessible to the entire organization. This naturally raises important questions: How can you do this in a structured way? How do you prevent unauthorized access to data? How do you determine who can see what information? How do you guarantee data quality? How do you ensure that datasets are easy to find and use? What initially starts out as a good idea can quickly lead to confusion because of all these new questions.
2 – Quick access to data.
Once organizations embark on a digital transformation, it often acts like an oil slick. A positive oil slick, that is. More and more employees in the organization want to get started with data, and they want it quickly. As a result, the central Business Intelligence department can often be inundated with requests for reports, analyses, opening up new data sources or making data sets available. But usually there are only a few BI specialists available. The result is that the requests pile up and the business side has to wait a long time for their data requests to be satisfied. In the worst case scenario, it ends up not happening at all.
3 – More and more data sources
Many organizations use a wide range of applications and platforms. Accessing all these different data sources can sometimes seem like a complex maze. Data professionals often spend hours extracting data from both SAP and non-SAP applications. Moreover, the essential semantics, logic and context of the data are often lost. These must then be rebuilt again, for example in a data warehouse. This while all this context was already available in the original business applications. The more applications an organization uses, the longer the process of unlocking data sources can take.
Create a business data fabric
The solution to these challenges? Create a “business data fabric.” Think of it as an integrated fabric of data on top of all your applications and systems. With this, you build an architecture that allows you to connect, streamline and manage all available data in real-time. This way, for example, you can create a 360-degree view of your customers by merging all the data from different customer-facing applications. Or you can ensure better sales forecasts by combining all relevant internal sales data with external data on market trends and developments.
You can create such a business data fabric using SAP Datasphere. With this data service, you provide seamless and scalable access to your data. You do this without duplicating data. Moreover, SAP Datasphere ensures that all business context is retained. In this way, you can make data sets quickly and clearly accessible to anyone who wants to use data for analysis and visualization. SAP Datasphere’s self-service capabilities make this extra easy. For example, users can easily search for available datasets. It is also very easy to quickly determine which definitions and calculations are used in certain datasets.
Find out more about SAP Datasphere
Is your organization also struggling to get value from your data? Discover how SAP Datasphere can help. Our specialists will be happy to tell you more about the specific benefits for your organization.
