Leveraging IoT and Industry Data for Managing Experiences and Decisions

Leveraging Data

Data is everywhere. Data comes from social interactions, personal devices, cloud service interactions, the environment, and many other places and things. There is a wide variety of data and a significant volume of data being collected every second. The velocity and quality of data are increasing every minute.

Big data can be considered a moment in society that will continue to grow by double figures each year. Any research on big data will give you insights into the magnitude that this moment is growing across the globe. People, organizations, and machines crave data to support their existence.

Every person is a participant in data collection. Every industry wants to leverage this data for truthful decisions that can affect their organizations. Many personal devices and organizational devices are connected to the Internet, which is usually referenced as the Internet of Things (IoT).

Leveraging all this data takes careful planning to support organizational strategic intent and overall decision-making capabilities. People and organizations use data to help remove slow manual interactions to improve the ability to react and be proactive for decisions and the overall well-being of the person or organization.

Data Visualization, Interoperability, and Connectivity

Quick decisions require the ability to visualize the data message from the noise easily. No one system functions without connectivity to another system for data exchanges by turning inputs into outputs for processing and analytics. Interfaces and data relationships have to be completely understood and interoperable across many distinct platforms. Enterprise data solutions are needed to leverage interoperability and connectivity across multiple data sources.

Data Decisions for Continuity

People and organizations want continuity of services. Continuity consists of:

• Ensuring the service is available when needed.
• Having enough capacity to support requests and analytic computations.
• Secure enough to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and information privacy.

Organizations have to continuously monitor and collect data, perform analysis and generate analytics, quickly implement solutions, perform constant tuning, and repeat these activities to listen to their systems and customers, including monitoring for threats, such as those related to cybersecurity.

If a threat to business continuity becomes apparent through data analysis, the organization needs to respond to the threat as soon as possible. If the threat creates an incident, the incident must be first detected, then addressed as soon as possible. If the incident creates damage, the damage must be repaired as soon as possible. The recovery actions need to be evaluated to stop the loss of business continuity as early in the cycle as possible. The ability to do proactive data detection and trend analysis across the organization’s products and services and across connected devices of their customers becomes important, especially for critical services impacting customers.

To accomplish this, business continuity plans need to be created, and IT continuity plans have to support business plans. Services have to be classified as critical or non-critical especially if they impact customers or revenue. Organizations may formally perform impact analysis and risk assessments. People may do the same informally to determine the criticality of products and services. There needs to be an exchange of data from the customer’s perspective to the organization for the creation of a proper response for the benefit of both the customer and the organization.

Organizations need to formalize the creation of proactive plans, testing, training, audits, and invocation of plans to collect data and help assure that the organization continues to function following a disruption. Without these formal activities, people will behave in a reactive manner to try to restore the capability of a service, which can compound an incident.

Managing Experience and Decision

Organizational needs and people needs have to be aligned. Understanding how people experience the services and products, including their dependency, continuity, and security needs, becomes very important for organizational survival. People who use critical products or services from an organization and then face a challenge with that deliverable will usually try to make a rapid decision to support their outcomes with the new provider. Employees who engage a new provider may never return to the provider that they had the issues with. An organization that loses a customer usually spends over three times more time and effort trying to regain loyalty.

An enterprise data strategy built on high-performing technology can help ensure high customer retention, low cost, and mitigate reputational damage to the organization. It is important to obtain and manage the right data about your customers across multiple data sources. Actian DataConnect makes it easy to connect operational data from any data source and transform it to facilitate effective data analysis. DataConnect makes it easy for data-driven enterprises to design, deploy, and manage data flows across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. We deliver cloud, hybrid, and on-premises data solutions that simplify how people connect, manage, and analyze data. We transform business by enabling customers to make confident, data-driven decisions that accelerate their organization’s growth. Our data platform integrates seamlessly, performs reliably, and delivers at industry-leading speeds.