Research has shown that less than 37% of business organisations perceive that IT’s digital initiatives are aligned with the business and only 25% believe that IT are correctly using their data. Until this divide is rectified, businesses will not be able to achieve the level of innovation which they so desire in the digital economy.
DataOps seeks to bridge this divide. DataOps creates one collaborative team of data operators and data consumers. It first acknowledges who the consumers are and who the operators are, and once this has been achieved, the process flow of data can be mapped out so that access requests can flow smoothly for both parties. Both groups must be involved in the process as a team so that all constraints and obstacles can be identified and quantified. Once identified, constraints can be eliminated through means such as automation, self-service, or simply through policy change.
However, DataOps would be nothing if it didn’t have the technological infrastructure to support it. In order to ensure the success of this process, organisations need to make sure they have comprehensive technology in place to support this collaborative effort. Areas of technology which should be frictionless should be:
• Governance, the security and integrity of the data
• Operation and scalability, monitoring, recovery and reliability of data systems
• Delivery and distribution of data environments
• Transformation, such as the modification of data, including masking and platform migration
• Versioning, the ability to capture data as it changes over time