Taking Steps to Unify Data for Maximum Value

Businesses have been on a data collection kick for a while now, and it’s no surprise since IDC says we’ll generate around 221 zettabytes of data by 2026. But if your goal is to turn all that data into insights, where do you start? Do you know what you have? Is it the right data? And, most importantly, is it yielding value for your business?

We commissioned 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, to survey 1,100 IT and data professionals from diverse global regions about what they want from their data, and the challenges they’re facing in achieving those goals. The findings are out now in Profitable Outcomes Linked to Data-Driven Maturity.

The survey revealed a handful of common issues that are impeding progress as businesses try to gather and present a unified view of their data. Among them:

• Meeting the streaming or real-time requirements needed to support data collection from 24x7 business models and Internet of Things devices
• Lack of automation, and a reliance on manual processes and legacy solutions
• Data quality issues with collecting inaccurate and out-of-date information
• Data silos and lack of system interoperability

Additionally, respondents said they need help determining the usability, trustworthiness, and quality of the information they’ve been gathering—and continue to gather—to maximize and optimize that data. If the data is incomplete or incorrect, an organization loses not only the time and effort required to gather and store it in the first place—it also puts itself at risk of noncompliance issues and strategic missteps that damage the bottom line.

Ensuring that you’re gathering the right data, and putting it to good use, requires a tool that can deliver a unified view. Automated capabilities are key to saving time and toil related to data processing, reducing errors, and delivering real-time visibility anytime from anywhere. BMC’s application workflow orchestration solutions, Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M, can help organizations optimize the data they’ve worked so hard to collect, and yield the most value from it.

Control-M simplifies application and data workflow orchestration on-premises or as a service. It makes it easy to build, define, schedule, manage, and monitor production workflows, ensuring visibility and reliability and improving service level agreements (SLAs). BMC Helix Control-M is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solution that integrates, automates, and orchestrates complex data and application workflows across highly heterogeneous technology environments.

Both solutions support the implementation of DataOps, which applies agile engineering and DevOps best practices to the field of data management to better organize, analyze, and leverage data and unlock business value. With DataOps, DevOps teams, data engineers, data scientists, and analytics teams collaborate to collect and implement data-driven business insights.

Automating and orchestrating data pipelines with tools like Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M is integral to DataOps, and can help you yield value from your data and drive better business outcomes by:

• Improving data quality: Once guardrails are in place to identify, collate, and analyze data, you’ll get a better sense of the data you have—and what you still need.
• Gaining better business insights: Now that you’re collecting and analyzing the data you want—and not cluttering it with the data you don’t—it’s an easier task to leverage that information for targeted, revenue-generating activities.
• Expanding innovation and cloud efficiency: With the cost savings achieved through data orchestration and better data processes, you can redirect spend toward innovation initiatives (informed by those very same data insights) that help grow the business.

You can read the full report, Profitable Outcomes Linked to Data-Driven Maturity, here. Visit bmc.com/controlm to learn more about Control-M and bmc.com/helixcontrolm to learn about BMC Helix Control-M.