Much has been made of big data and the ongoing generation of legions of virtual information stores, generated from ever more connected devices and productivity-enhancing applications. Unsurprisingly, basic data management has grown into a full-blown cottage industry. But increasingly, a broader set of competencies, which can be loosely gathered under the “data stewardship” umbrella, have become a critical part of operations for businesses.
Data stewardship encompasses data migration, data quality and data governance projects, and is largely oriented around workflow mappings, policies and rules engines. In the era of cloud services and ubiquitous mobility, the idea is for all of that data to be accessible, with repeatable, automated workflows that can be written once and applied everywhere.
Carolyn Hughes (News - Alert), senior product marketing manager at BackOffice Associates, outlined a common scenario in a recent company blog: “How many times have you found yourself recreating another spreadsheet, rewriting a rule or description or revising a template? Have you thought about how much time it takes away from more critical responsibilities?”
But by leveraging the power of the cloud allows data stewards to store forms, rules and templates in a central location, exposing them to the systems that need them, when they’re needed. “What if you could store and retrieve this work you just set up and apply it to downstream projects that need to access the same source data, or need to have exactly the same rule applied for consistency across your programs or data governance projects?” she said.
The idea is to establish a master data system for rules and other specific project content, within a collaborative environment that’s accessible to co-workers.
“Additionally, you can orchestrate your business data based on best practices and your company’s requirements, and all that time spent rehashing rules and mappings and templates can now be turned into a much more rewarding and productive work governing your data,” Hughes said.
BackOffice Associates’ dspCloud for instance offers templates, reports and mappings prebuilt and available to target systems, such as SAP, Oracle (News - Alert) or others.
“Based on a Business Reference Model (BRM), our content is backed by a library of thousands of callable elements that allow us to work with any system,” she explained. “We have catalogued more than 60 source systems, countless custom legacy systems and the most complex targets in the industry.”
The industry is certainly growing. MarketsandMarkets forecasts the global cloud-based data services market to grow from $3.51 billion in 2014 to $13.28 billion by 2019, at an estimated CAGR of 30.5 percent from 2014 to 2019.
It’s well worth the investment; companies with adequate data stewardship are the disruptive innovators in the industry, according to Hughes.
“They’re building a culture that is data driven and where decisions are made with as much empirical data to support a position, instead of intuition and politics,” she said. “Data has become a resource that has helped efficiently democratize decision making within companies. In short, data is helping companies learn a lot faster which means better products for customers.”
Edited by Alisen Downey