In only a few years' time, the world of data management has been altered dramatically, and this is a change that is still running its course. No longer are databases run in back rooms by administrators worrying about rows and columns. Now, actionable information is sought by decision makers at all levels of the enterprise, and the custodians of this data need to work closely with the business.
That's because, in the wake of the recent financial crisis and economic downturn, there's a push from both high-level corporate management and regulators to achieve greater understanding and greater transparency across the enterprise, Jeanne Harris, executive research fellow and a senior executive at the Accenture Institute for High Performance, and co-author, along with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work, tells DBTA. "In many ways, I think the ultimate result of the financial crisis is that executives realized they cannot delegate analytics to subordinates; they can't view it as technology or math that doesn't really affect them."
Harris urges executives to heed the words of one of the world's savviest business investors. "Warren Buffett used to say that you shouldn't invest in any company you can't understand," she points out. "I think if the financial crisis has proven anything, it's that you shouldn't run a company you don't understand. Executives recognize they need to get a lot smarter about what the key assumptions are underlying their business, and be a lot more thoughtful about how they make decisions. That's going to drive us all to a much more analytical future, a much more thoughtful future. We're going to see people making decisions based on data, as opposed to trying to use data to justify a decision they've already made."
Analytics is one of the most business-driven changes to the data management discipline. DBTA gathered input from a range of industry experts of the new direction of data and identified the following trends ... full article.
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