ISG Momentum® Strategic Perspectives - DataOps Presents Opportunities for Service Providers
To fully harness data at the level that modern competitiveness requires, a business needs to become a cognitive enterprise that builds data-driven insight into all its operations. That transformation requires scalable, repeatable processes for managing data pipelines and their output, with quality controls built in. Put another way, organizations need a formal DataOps program instead of taking an ad hoc approach to running data management, analytics, big data and other BI programs. In ISG’s experience, many enterprises need help developing and implementing DataOps programs, and even for understanding the need for DataOps and its value. This current state of the market presents consulting and ongoing service delivery opportunities for service providers.
The ISG swoop chart for sourcing decisions across the analytics service catalog shows many provider opportunities for DataOps-related services (Figure 1). Mature organizations at steady state typically exhibit the following division of responsibilities.
Figure 1 – Sourcing Decision Swoop Chart for Analytics Service Catalog
DataOps use is growing and becoming increasingly important to enterprise competitiveness, but it is hard to start and even harder to scale. Unlike departmental initiatives or one-off data projects, DataOps requires some farther-reaching changes across organizational culture and information architecture. Such changes are hard to make; 92 percent of companies say culture is their leading impediment to becoming a data-driven organization.
There is a tendency to model DataOps efforts after DevOps, which most organizations now have some experience with. This approach is problematic, and the most serious problems tend to surface when organizations try to scale their DataOps efforts. Service providers can add value to clients by helping them manage the surge in data and demand for insights in an organized, scalable way.
This thought paper highlights some of the DataOps challenges ISG has observed at enterprises and identifies the related opportunities for service providers.
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