How many organizations have the right technology to thrive in the data economy? We have identified 10 attributes of an organization’s data infrastructure that will help enable it to take advantage of the opportunities. For starters, organizations need platforms and solutions that are scalable, extensible, and collaborative.

But not many organizations have this kind of infrastructure.

A small group, however, is much stronger when it comes to technology. These are the organizations we call the Data Economy Leaders, and they are outperforming their peers.

Here, we look at the crucial attributes of data economy technology—scalability and power, interoperability and extensibility, and data collaboration—and find out how the Data Economy Leaders are excelling with all three.

SCALABILITY AND POWER

Accessing and participating in the data economy exposes any organization to a near-infinite amount of previously unseen insights. But those insights come from data—exponentially more data available than any organization already has access to.

Some solutions can struggle to deliver the scale and power needed to store, integrate, analyze, and share that data without significant overhaul. And when they do scale up to meet peak demand, are they elastic? Can they scale back down to minimize overhead?

More than twice as many Data Economy Leaders as Laggards (the group at the other end of the spectrum) describe their data storage and management technologies as “easily scalable and elastic.”

A modern cloud data platform could help Data Economy Laggards by supplying near-instant and infinite storage and computing that can scale up and down—and on the fly. This solution should also be flexible in order to centralize, integrate, analyze, and share various types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. The Data Economy Leaders are much more likely than Laggards to use one or more modern cloud-based platforms to deliver data-driven insights.

Where organizations store their data can determine how scalable and extensible their solution will be. Most store some or all of their data in the cloud. But using a single cloud data platform can give organizations the power they need to accommodate their data and the data they access by participating in the data economy.

The vast majority of Data Economy Leaders store their data in the cloud

Base: 250 IT Executives

“Our data infrastructure opens the door to a scalable and agile [cloud data] platform, on which customers can easily access data sets,” said Bhaskar Peddhapati, Head of Global Platform Engineering at NielsenIQ. “This allows them to extract the data they need to fit their own technology strategy.”

A cloud platform can also accelerate the pace at which organizations acquire data, and can shorten the time it takes to analyze data. Our research suggests that most organizations—even the Data Economy Leaders—need to get more acceleration out of their data platforms and applications.

say it takes on average eight days or longer to source, integrate, and prepare new data for access and analysis by business users. Today’s cloud data platforms, and the data marketplaces they enable access to, can reduce this to a fraction of that time.

say it takes 30 minutes or longer to query all of their sales data to determine gross revenue by region and time frame. Depending on the cloud data platform, a query such as this can take a few minutes or less.

INTEROPERABILITY AND EXTENSIBILITY

To generate insights, organizations need a continuous flow of data. And for this they need robust and reliable data pipelines.

Participating in the data economy involves gathering data from a variety of sources—external as well as internal—including partners and commercial data providers. So building data pipelines often means connecting to third-party services and libraries, and in a way that enables data to move freely in and out of the platform.

Most of our surveyed organizations struggle with this: only 22% of respondents say their data management solution integrates well with complementary tools and solutions.

Many organizations are struggling with their data infrastructure

Share of respondents agreeing with statements about the technology their organization currently uses to store and manage data

Base: 250 IT Executives

A mandate to become more data-forward is important. But for CEOs and other senior leaders, it is just the start. “They must be consistent and vocal advocates of the data strategy,” said Bernard Marr, a business futurist and author of Data Strategy.

The CEO does not have to be a data or technology professional, but they should be able to articulate, clearly and loudly, what data-driven insights mean to the business. And the CEO should empower their CDO to implement the organization’s data-forward strategy.

DATA COLLABORATION

When it comes to data, collaboration means the secure and governed methods of sharing and accessing data, data services, and data applications within organizations and with external parties. This is the essential business of the data economy.

Chief data officers (CDOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) must ensure their cloud data platform and applications make sharing as seamless and reliable as possible—wherever data and business users are located, locally and globally.

Tom Mazzaferro is CDO of Western Union, which has more than half a million retail/agent locations worldwide that rely on exchanging data with headquarters to serve customers. "We’re now able to share data on settlements with our agents and digital partners on a daily basis through the use of a private exchange,” said Mazzaferro. “They don’t need to upload it any more—they can just access it instantly and go. It’s more secure. It’s encrypted. And it enables us to keep and store data in a single place, rather than having it leave our firewall and our environment."

There are other technology attributes that underpin data collaboration. It has to be versatile, for instance, to execute diverse analytic workloads, such as data warehousing, data lakes, data science, and data engineering, and be the development platform for modern data applications.

The technology must also be secure, resilient, and governed. So it has to protect data at rest and in transit, and provide for remedial actions, across regions and clouds, if there is an outage. It must also ensure that the data management meets industry and regional privacy regulations—wherever it is.