Three common challenges when unlocking value in your data

Data can be enormously valuable to your organisation. Provided you know how to turn that data into analyses and insights. Preferably in such a way that your entire organisation can use it. But that can be quite challenging. Discover three challenges that often occur when unlocking the value in your data. And why a business data fabric can be the solution. 

Customer contacts, order numbers, results of marketing campaigns and stock figures. All business data can bring value to your organisation. After all, with the insights you get from data, you can make well-informed decisions that can positively influence your organisation’s performance. We probably don’t need to explain all that to you anymore. Yet some organisations still struggle with unlocking the value in data. Why is that?

To extract value from your business data, you need to have easy access and at the same time be able to grant controlled access to that data. And there is quite a bit involved in that. These are three common challenges that organisations face when accessing data.

1 – Data for the whole organisation

Data can be of value to everyone in your organisation. From logistics staff to marketers and management. Therefore, the trick is to make data available to your entire organisation. This automatically raises crucial questions: how do you do that in an orderly way? How do you ensure that not just anyone can see all the data? How do you determine who is allowed to see what? How do you guarantee quality? How do you ensure that datasets are easy to find and use? What starts out as a good idea often results in a lot of confusion because of all these new questions.

2 – Quick access to data

Once organisations embark on a digital transformation, it often acts like an oil slick. A positive oil slick, that is. More and more people in the organisation then want to work with data. And quickly too. As a result, the central Business Intelligence department is regularly overloaded with requests for reports, analyses, opening up new data sources or making data sets available. But in most cases, only a few BI specialists are employed. As a result, requests pile up and the business has to wait a long time for their data needs to be honoured. And in the worst case scenario, it ends up not happening at all.

3 – More and more data sources

Many organisations use an extensive set of applications and platforms. Unlocking all those data sources then sometimes looks like an endless maze. Data professionals often spend hours trying to get data out of SAP and non-SAP applications. In the process, the data also loses crucial semantics, logic and context in many cases. Things that data professionals then rebuild in, for instance, a data warehouse. Even though all that context was already available in the original business applications. The more applications an organisation uses, the longer it takes to unlock data sources.

Create a business data fabric

The solution to these challenges? Create a business data fabric. Think of it as a weave of data on top of all your applications and systems. You thus build an architecture that allows you to connect, streamline and manage all available data in real-time. For example, you create a 360-degree view of your customers by bringing together all data from different customer applications. Or better sales forecasts by combining all relevant internal sales data with external data on market trends and developments.

You can create such a business data fabric using SAP Datasphere. With this data service, you ensure seamless and scalable access to your data. You do this without duplicating data. Moreover, SAP Datasphere ensures that all business context is retained. This allows you to make data sets quickly and clearly accessible to anyone who wants to use data for analysis and visualisation. SAP Datasphere’s self-service capabilities make this extra easy. For example, users can easily search for available datasets. It is also very easy to quickly determine which definitions and calculations are used in certain datasets.

en berekeningen gehanteerd worden in bepaalde datasets.

Find out more about SAP Datasphere

Is your organisation also struggling to get value from your data? Discover how SAP Datasphere can help. Our specialists will be happy to tell you more about the specific benefits for your organisation.

Contact our experts.

Want to read more about SAP Datasphere? Read our blog:

“Why SAP Datasphere is the key to the value in your data”.

Valuable data for your organisation can be anywhere. In the numerous applications your organisation uses, but also in external data sources. How do you bring all that data together and create an orderly, rich, real-time and always available data landscape? SAP Datasphere helps you extract value from your data.

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