July 08, 2021
For all of the buzz surrounding both artificial intelligence and data-driven management, many companies have seen mixed results in their quest to harness the value of enterprise data. To avoid those pitfalls, we mixed best-of-breed and proprietary solutions to develop our enterprise data platform (EDP), focusing much of our attention on a combination of smart changes in technology, culture and process for data lakes.
The EDP, as we call it internally, includes a full suite of organizational data, enterprise data tools and services capable of ingesting and processing 30TB+ of data sources and 50TB+ of data. The platform includes automation, security, virtualization, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Each year, we invest around $5 million in this platform, and in less than three years, we’ve returned multiples of that amount in both cost savings and additional new revenue for the company.
Now we want to explain how we got here and what it may mean for others on their quest to build a similar platform. We presented our key findings in a session at the recent Hitachi Social Innovation Forum 2021, Americas, on a topic called, “Hitachi on Hitachi: Finding Data’s Value in Our Enterprise Data Lake.”
To put this effort in perspective, it helps to understand the business opportunity and what obstacles you may encounter along the way. According to consistent reports over the years, workers spend nearly half of their time searching for and preparing data instead of gaining insights that can help drive better business outcomes. In an enterprise, harnessing data is often held back by a lack of collaboration, knowledge gaps, or even resistance to change. And many industry analyst firms indicate that enterprises continue to struggle to realize business value from their organization’s data and analytics investments.
In developing the EDP, we identified four common data lake challenges and effective mitigation strategies.
There are myriad ways that enterprises can achieve a healthy return on investment (ROI) from their EDP-style data lakes. In several of our significant wins thus far, we:
Now we know, with a corporate-wide commitment to change, and carefully managed investments in modern enterprise data platforms, companies can finally deliver actionable business intelligence and tangible returns that wouldn’t otherwise be possible with existing data silos. Hitachi Vantara’s EDP project has achieved true data democratization. And in migrating so much data to the cloud, we are running more efficiently and at a lower cost than ever before.
Tim Langley-Hawthorne is CIO at Hitachi Vantara.
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