Data, more precious than gold

“Data is the new oil!” slogan has been heard by many of us in the IT industry.

Although the usability between Oil and Data is not the same, the way we “Mine” is quite relevant to one and another. Most of us know that data is growing day by day and according to DOMO in 2017, the internet produced 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day and the world internet population has grown by roughly 3.7 billion people in 2017.

What does it mean to a company?

According to a report by Forrester, between 60-73 percent of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. If data is the new oil, you might ask, why is that so?

There are three big factors as to why a company might not analyze their data:

  1. People
  2. Technology
  3. Budget
  4. People

In general, a company usually has the IT Department and Business Analysts support users with their IT needs such as reporting and analyzing records.

Most companies currently utilize static reports and scarce dashboards to analyze their sales, revenue streams, profit margins and etc.

Technology

Traditional technology to store data such as RDBMS (Mysql, Postgres, SQLServer, Oracle, and etc), Log server (Syslog, Log4j) & Excel / CSV format work great delivering the static and historical report that you want.

However, Traditional technology mentions above will have limitation to store & process trillion of data. Therefore, we will need upscale technology examples such as:

  • Storage:
    • On-Premise:
      • Hadoop File System (HDFS).
    • On Cloud:
      • Google Data Storage.
      • Amazon S3 Bucket.
    • Processing
      • On-Premise:
        • Big Data Spark
        • Big Data Map Reduce v2
      • On Cloud
        • Google Data Proc (Spark, Map Reduce V2)
        • Google Big Query
        • Google BigTable
        • Amazon EMR

Budget

To implement data analytics systems, we have a few options:

  1. On-premise – High investment
  2. On cloud – Generally low initial investment, easy to start but limited to certain industries and countries data regulatory restrictions.
  3. Hybrid – Generally modest initial investment. Data stored on-premise, processing power on the cloud. A mix of both systems

Why should a company invest in analytics?

Any company that wants to innovate and move a step ahead their competitors needs to analyze their data more efficiently to boost the company value.

A good example is social media data. Companies analyzing trends apparent in social media can learn how their existing products can be communicated to suit the current needs/wants of their audience

Building on this, Singapore is currently trending towards healthier, less sugary beverages. A drink company can capitalize on this by placing importance on one of their healthier products with the aim of targeting these health-conscious audiences

How do we know this? we analyst the trending sales of sugary drink vs non-sugary drink and how the government is campaigning “War with Diabetes” effects the mindset of people.

But how do we know this?

We can first look at the current “war with Diabetes” and look at sales of sugary vs non-sugary drinks. These factors affect how audiences will react to promotional material that is released regarding these topics

How iZeno can help your company to start their analytics journey?

Our first step is understanding your challenge, we listen to your requirements and formulate a custom set of solutions to your specifications.

We also guide you through the infrastructure, technology, budgetary and human resource requirements that your journey will take

The flowchart below demonstrates the overall journey with us.

Diagnose the current process

We sit down with you to define, prioritize & identify the existing process to see how we can improve it or make changes.

Design the analytic journey 

Once we understand your unique method of working, we design a new use case or and reconfigure existing processes from best practice in the industry and tailor make it to your needs

We understand each company has a unique way of working. iZeno believes in the Hexagonal Design process as shown in below hexagonal chart.

We will explain the Hexagonal design process in another segment.

Create data mining processes

Quite often the data that a business wants or needs is either somewhere in their system or a physical file in the hand of certain people. The data mining journey will guide the company through the process to gather that data and integrate it into their system

Delivering the analytics programs

We optimize the agile development and implementation with long term success in mind to deliver a solution that ensures customer satisfaction

The hexagonal design process

  1. Raw Data Process

This segment concerns the cataloging of raw data into metadata and the overall data governance process.

This process Includes data stewardship, data Quality, use case & master data management.

  1. Transformation

Transforming cleans data to a data lake and data mart for aggregation and analytic reporting.

This concerns data warehouse schema such as star schema, snowflake schema or data vault schema.

  1. Compliance 

In according with GDPR, Company policy & Country policy, we have to store the data as per security compliance.

Examples of this are allowing for the deletion of EU citizen historical data, row level security, column level security, data encryption, data masking and data isolation based on the restrictive ACL user role.

  1. Validation 

This is the validating and testing of the data in accordance with the test cases created by the users.

  1. Publishing

The publishing step is the publishing of the data mart via a business Intelligence solution such as self-service BI, Static Reporting & Dynamic Dashboard to the user.

  1. Archiving

After publishing, an appropriate archiving technique is applied based on the needs of the organization.

This can be a warm or cold backup technique.

CI/CD continues development of data process

We are following our CI/CD process as per our DevOpsSec as below.

 

Starting from Planning our requirement, coding, building, testing, release, deploy, operate, monitor and come to the beginning again.

Conclusion

Each company has a unique analytics journey that they must navigate when seeking to reconfigure or build. With iZeno, we can ensure that the journey sails smoothly and systematically to the destination.

About iZeno

iZeno was founded in 2003 on the principle of providing enterprises with best-in-class solutions they need to keep their business running seamlessly. With a team of 70+ innovators, in-house, we have delivered over 500 Enterprise Solutions, implemented and optimized to enable smarter insights.

Our team draws on industry experiences in accomplishing a portfolio of mission-critical applications, integrating Cloud, CRM, Data Analytics, and other leading technologies with our clients existing IT frameworks.

With a leading presence in the region, headquartered in Singapore and operation in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines, no project is too complex for us, and our team is always ready for a new challenge.

Get in touch with us here.