In today's technological age, two terms are somewhat mysterious and awesome. The first is "digital transformation". People may think that effective digital transformation is a panacea for solving business problems. The second is "data integration". Most of the company's expenditure is for
data integration.
So, what is the relationship between these two core terms? How does this relationship bring competitive advantages to enterprises? In this webinar, industry experts discussed and analyzed the following issues:
How does being good at data and analysis affect business transformation?
Why is
data analysis still so difficult for suppliers?
In the coronavirus epidemic, the number of hacker attacks has increased significantly. In view of this, how important are data governance, data privacy, and
data security?
As more and more companies migrate their business to the cloud, where is the data? And how to integrate it and make it useful?
What is the future of data integration and digital transformation?
In order to have a deeper understanding of digital transformation and data integration, industry media conducted analysis and discussion with two industry thought leaders: the two experts are Myles Suer, the global corporate marketing director of Dell Boomi, a cloud computing integration platform provider, and "For Digital Martin Mocker, one of the co-authors of the design book.
|| How does data and analysis affect business transformation?
Suer: "I think digital transformation has gone through two stages. The initial stage is to use analog methods to realize the digital process. Many people digitalize the written process of their expenditure reports. For me, this allows me to pay by credit card. It is a good thing to pay in time before the deadline.
I think the current digital transformation is very different. The key is how to transform and change the business? There are some good examples. I think the typical example is General Electric. The company’s president said, “What does digital transformation mean to us? How will it change our work?” So they changed their business model, not just selling jet engines, but to Airlines sell a "safe flight" service, and there are too many examples of this.
My friend Jeanne Ross likes to talk about her shopping experience at Nordstrom, a department store chain, where she changed her way of buying and found what she wanted to buy. Therefore, the challenge facing companies and CIOs today is to add data and analysis as a business capability, and then use these capabilities to change the way the company and its customers interact and sell. "
Mocker: "The business model has now changed. We believe that digital transformation or digital-related business transformation are actually two different transformations in progress. The role of data is also different, depending on the transformation people see .
Digitization is about using numbers and data to improve operational excellence in business processes and how companies do things. Suer believes that companies use digitalization to create new products for their customers and try to solve problems that they could not solve before.
With the development of digitization, data plays an important role. It is related to the transparency and visibility of processes and the display of data between processes. For digital technology, companies will provide customers with some data. For example, a manufacturing company wants to provide consulting services based on the usage data of the machines it sells, so its roles are different, and it pays more attention to internal employees and external customers. "
|| Why is data analysis still so difficult for suppliers?
Suer: "Part of the reason is people’s perception of the organization. Therefore, many companies now have all this data and silos, and must release it, so they will encounter some problems because it is not perfect. Companies may Encountered a problem because there is no single view, and once this operation is performed, it is ready to be analyzed and then processed by data scientists. Many vendors say that most of their work is only for data cleaning, not model building.
Therefore, all these issues need to be resolved faster. However, the survey shows that only 28% of enterprises have achieved digitalization, 51% of enterprises are still in silos, and the remaining 21% are in trouble. Many companies are not proficient in this technology, but they must continue to work hard, otherwise they will not be able to bridge the digital divide. "
Mocker: So this is technical heritage, because there is data everywhere. Enterprises like to process their own data, but it is difficult to integrate. I think there is another legacy issue that is business legacy. What I want to say is that if you talk about data integration, then data integration is actually business integration. Some companies no longer just sell a single product. Just like a car insurance company, you can apply for car loans and help customers buy cars.
Companies need to integrate across the entire business department, which is difficult, and it takes more time than integrating IT systems. This means changing the incentive mechanism of sales staff. Companies can change the governance structure, so how to make decisions in these different departments? This means that the priority process of the company has changed and skills need to be improved. It is more difficult for some companies, unless you have greater certainty about it.
There is no doubt that this is an ever-changing goal, and the adoption of new technologies can enable companies to do things that they could not do before, but they need to change ways that they could not change before. "
|| In the coronavirus epidemic, hacker attacks have increased significantly. In view of this, how important is data governance, data privacy, and data security?
Suer: "We mainly use firewalls for defense. A friend of mine wrote a book called "Privacy Engineer's Manifesto" a few years ago. She pointed out in the book why companies don't set data access permissions? Who can read it? To what? Who can't see it? So there really needs to be a broader consideration of the data collected, why it was collected, and how to protect it.
In many cases, the data is jointly owned. But data governance has always been a difficult thing. For a long time, many CIOs are reluctant to talk about this topic. They hope to find a better way to deal with it, but all of this has changed.
Therefore, chief information officers and chief data officers are playing a more active role. They are all working hard to implement these practices, and I think that if they have not realized the importance of obtaining and accessing data, they need to protect this data. "
|| How does cloud computing play a role in data integration and digital transformation?
Mocker: "Obviously, more and more companies are migrating their data to cloud platforms, not only to a cloud platform, but also to the edge. So data is everywhere.
There is no doubt that this makes the integration problem more challenging. And I think there are many ways to solve the problem technically as well as from the business side. I think from a technical point of view, many things need to be done to provide data through APIs. Therefore, enterprises will adopt a variety of platforms that serve different purposes and need to own an operating system.
Many companies have digital product platforms. They need to communicate with each other, register, and then connect to the IoT platform. However, companies also need to issue invoices and adopt an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Companies want to decouple them through APIs, so this has become a trend. If you want to get data, you can put the API on everything.
Enterprises obtain data externally and can also extract data internally. Therefore, all content is encapsulated in API and component relationships. I think this integration problem needs to be carried out from the business side.
So when talking about APIs, someone said that you can wrap the system in the API or wrap the data in the API. Companies need to implement large projects that actually perform this operation on all systems. In fact, companies want to promote this development through product or business process plans, because the business goals that companies need to develop will promote gradual integration, because otherwise it will be difficult to achieve.
I think many companies really want to adopt API strategies and will usher in a bright future. However, it is difficult to obtain funding for these projects, so it is necessary to maintain a long-term perspective, and it is very difficult for investors to obtain ownership and see their value.
But if someone says, ‘we want to create a new product, so we need to integrate all this data," then the business needs to figure this out, and this is when integration comes into play."
Suer: "I think there are many companies that give up all the integrations they have built over the years, and then build APIs. And doing so may slow their progress.
Therefore, we believe that a more sensible strategy is to start with integration and then start with building APIs. But let me give a surprising example. I know more about Martin's book and I have gained knowledge about DBS Bank. Some companies are doing this. What they did was create directories that were widely used internally and internally, and then created directories for external users.
Therefore, the one thing they expose is the API. Use an ATM application and expose it as an API. I studied this issue a few years ago. Cash is actually the most expensive payment method today, because it is easy to lose and stolen, and these things can happen. So if cash can be withdrawn from the cash register, this is a good thing for convenience stores. Therefore, who would have thought that ATM applications built a few years ago could be used, packaged and then made public. "
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