Is your organization still charging teams for basic access to data? For many CIOs today, the hidden costs of this legacy model are becoming increasingly clear. In almost every situation, cross-charging for data prevents you from achieving true data-driven business transformation.
In our latest eBook, The Hidden Costs of IT Charging for Analytics-Ready Data, we unpack the many reasons why cross-charging departments for analytics-ready data is an archaic practice that severely limits an organization’s ability to keep up with the pace of modern business. This eBook is filled with practical, first-hand advice for CIOs on how to break free from this outdated model and embrace the new economics of business intelligence. Here’s a preview:
Focus on Business Needs, Not Data Limitations
At many organizations today, sales, marketing, and other departments struggle to understand the need to pay an “entry fee” to access data. Increasingly, these teams view the customer and corporate data being generated by the systems in their purview as their information. This situation reinforces existing divisions between business and IT, and often leads teams to go around IT to find their own solutions.
What can you do? Stop charging teams for basic access to data. Instead, focus your team’s energies on more urgent and higher-value activities, such as data enrichment and advanced analysis. Funnel analysis with machine learning and predictive analytics, for example, is highly valuable and still out of reach for everyday business users. The same goes for enriching data sets with new sources of data that can provide business users with greater visibility and insight into the decisions they are making.
Recognize the Growth of Analytics Skills Outside of IT
Data expertise is no longer limited to IT teams. Today, technology-savvy individuals are spread across all areas of an organization, particularly millennial hires who have never known a world which didn’t run on computers and data. In fact, there’s a good chance you have business users with PhDs in data science operating outside the walls of IT right now. These individuals are eager to take advantage of self-service BI and build their own analysis. Preventing them from accessing data is the last thing you want to do as a CIO in today’s business environment.
In dismantling outdated practices like charging for basic data access and positioning IT as data gatekeepers, you can signal to these staffers in other departments that your teams are keen to partner with them to create a more data-driven organization.
Don’t Let the Future Push You Out of the Way
Demand for access to data will only continue to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years and decades. For CIOs that stick to the old cost-center model for data access, it’s a long road filled with frustration and missed opportunities.
Breaking with antiquated processes and driving organizational change is how you as CIO can signal your belief in the growing value of data, as well as show that you are the person who can lead your organization through data-driven business transformation. If you can’t meet your organization’s need for data, perhaps the C-suite will look to someone else instead. Enter the Chief Data Officer. Download your copy of The Hidden Costs of IT Charging for Analytics-Ready Data today to learn how to cement your position in the organization, strengthen the bond between business and IT, and secure a data-driven future for your entire company.