Business leaders and data teams who manage Data Engineering activities at a mega scale know one thing for sure – time is the scarcest resource at their disposal.
Keeping up with evolving trends and adapting to changes swiftly requires extracting insights from inbound data in the blink of an eye. Data Agility, therefore, refers to the ability of businesses to match the speed of their data operations to the pace of the industry. Simply put, this means that Data Agility looks at the entire data lifecycle through the lens of time. It asks 2 key questions:
How swiftly can a business sift through its data to uncover valuable insights?
How quickly can decision-makers translate these insights into actionable decisions?
Therefore, the Data Agility of an enterprise depends on its ability to do the following quickly, accurately, consistently, and continuously:
- Identifying the right data, cleaning it, pre-processing it, and making it analytics-ready,
- Developing data models and choosing the best-fit model for a business problem or goal,
- Extracting accurate, complete, and actionable insights at scale, and
- Taking decisions and actions based on insights – just in time.
When we dig deeper into the nuts and bolts of the four points mentioned above, it becomes increasingly clear that while some organizations might fare well in one or more of the above aspects, only some have aced it on all fronts. Since traditional analytics doesn’t even remotely fit the bill, many organizations simply don’t have the right tools at their disposal to make Data Agility a reality.
Will More Tools Solve the Data Agility Problem?
In a recent study, Experian surveyed over 900 business leaders to assess how companies are currently integrating agility and flexibility into their data management initiatives. According to the findings of this study, “92% of businesses believe agility would enable better decision-making across their operations.”
Unfortunately, when businesses decide to go agile, they often end up adding more tools to their analytics ecosystem to solve their existing data problems. If more tools were the answer, businesses would have solved the Data Agility problem long ago, given that the market is flooded with innumerable data products. On the contrary, adopting a plethora of data tools that aren’t in sync only compounds the problem.
Most of these tools address only a small part of the larger data puzzle on their own, and the more tools businesses add, the more complex their data value chains become. Hence, their Data Agility goals become less and less attainable over time.
Barriers to Data Agility: Identifying the Stumbling Blocks
Firstly, agility in managing data from start to finish requires a cohesive data platform that can automatically clean, pre-process, and unify different kinds of data – be it structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data. All of this must happen in near-real-time, without users having to wait for weeks or even days to get analytics-ready data.
Why is this important? To quote this article on Forbes:
“Data scientists spend 60% of their time on cleaning and organizing data. Collecting data sets comes second at 19% of their time, meaning data scientists spend around 80% of their time on preparing and managing data for analysis.”
This means that with Data Scientists buried neck-deep under grunt work, the wheels of data and insights are turning slower than ever, and businesses are losing the race when it comes to making the right decisions at the right time. But, the nightmare doesn’t end there – even with Data Scientists taking the heat, a large chunk of data remains unused. For example, recent Seagate-IDC research revealed, “Only 32% of data available to enterprises is put to work. The remaining 68% is unleveraged.”
Secondly, for a data platform to be truly agile, it must have a domain-driven Global Data Definition across the entire enterprise, backed by rich, robust metadata. Without a single source of truth for all enterprise data, Data Agility is a far cry from reality.
The following quote from this article on McKinsey Digital demonstrates how Data Agility is affected by sparse, sporadic, and scattered data management systems:
“Data users can spend between 30 and 40 percent of their time searching for data if a clear inventory of available data is not available.”
So, what's the solution? How can businesses turn their data initiatives into agile decision-making hubs? This is where our award-winning product – MECBot – steps in. It cuts through the noise and connects the dots, turning data chaos into a well-orchestrated continuum of actionable insights that reach every decision-maker just in time. With MECBot, you're not just keeping up with change – you're leading the change and taking charge of the future.
Effortless Data Agility with MECBot: Make Decisions 10X Faster
Introducing MECBot
MECBot by FORMCEPT is a leading data excellence platform for just-in-time decision-making. It is designed to solve key enterprise data challenges in an end-to-end manner. It enables insight-driven decision-making without relying on the underlying databases or the data structure. This makes MECBot the go-to data analytics platform for several leading Fortune 1000 clients across the globe across industries like Banking, Insurance, Retail, Healthcare, and more.
Here is a quick video that explains what MECBot can do.
Introducing Metaspace: MECBot’s Secret Sauce to Beat Data Overwhelm
When it comes to Data Agility, Metaspace is MECBot’s secret sauce.
Think of Metaspace as the central nervous system of your data ecosystem, connecting billions of data points in real-time. Its key components are:
- Domain Ontology: Domain Ontology acts as the Global Data Definition for an enterprise and provides a standardized way of organizing data and relationships from the domain perspective. It eliminates key data management problems like schema gaps, semantic drift, and all instances of misfit between the data and the domain.
- Knowledge Graph: MECBot’s Smart Knowledge Graph connects data using semantic relationships to help leverage knowledge effectively, and unearth hidden patterns in data. It solves core data challenges like gaps between data and insights, inaccurate data relationships, and obsolete data views.
- Advanced Metadata: A secure channel of rich, advanced metadata spans the entire data ecosystem in MECBot, providing vital context and structure to data. It aids in data quality, consistency, accuracy, and security, and prevents data nightmares like compliance failure, governance issues, security breaches, and erosion of trust in data.
With Metaspace as the Single Source of Truth, Data Agility Becomes MECBot’s Default Setting
The typical journey of data in MECBot’s Metaspace starts with a dynamic, extensible, and ever-evolving Domain Ontology, which automatically captures, maps, and contextualizes all existing and inbound data to create a comprehensive Enterprise Knowledge Graph.
The Enterprise Knowledge Graph is enriched with real-world data connections and rich metadata, answering the most critical questions about every data point. This way, MECBot’s Metaspace sets the gold standard for integrated data management by breaking down data barriers, harmonizing data types and formats, and serving as the single source of truth for the entire enterprise.
With all data users working from this unified, automated, secure, and trusted data layer, the IT and administrative burden of managing data pipelines is drastically reduced. As a result, the data system can expand and evolve continually without increasing in complexity, thus making Data Agility the default setting for all data operations within MECBot.
Check out this video on how MECBot works with Metaspace at its core.
MECBot’s Business-First Approach to Data Agility, Powered by Metaspace
With Metaspace at its core, MECBot makes managing all enterprise data easy, quick, and automated, while enabling scalable domain-driven applications that can be tailored even to the most challenging and complex business problems. By putting the business first, MECBot acts as the highway between raw data and actionable insights, driving market-winning business decisions just in time.
Here’s a glimpse of what agile decision-making looks like with MECBot:
- Real-time Data Integration: Seamlessly integrates data from diverse sources in real-time, ensuring up-to-date insights and responsiveness to changing business needs.
- Scalability and Elasticity: Scales your data infrastructure dynamically to handle varying workloads and data volumes efficiently.
- Self-Service Data Preparation: Empowers business users to prepare and transform data independently with intuitive tools and guided workflows, reducing dependency on data teams.
- Data Quality Management: Implements robust data quality checks and automated cleansing processes to maintain data accuracy and reliability.
- Advanced Analytics and Visualization: Leverages advanced analytics capabilities and intuitive visualization tools to uncover actionable insights quickly and effectively.
- Data Governance and Compliance: Ensures adherence to regulatory requirements and internal policies through comprehensive data governance frameworks and audit trails.
- Guided AI Decisions: MECBot's Guided AI gives contextual recommendations to users on how best to make use of the data before them. Rather than making decisions for you, MECBot acts as your trusted guide for converting data into decisions.
- Collaborative Data Environment: Fosters collaboration among cross-functional teams by providing a unified platform for data sharing, exploration, and collaboration.
- Adaptive Data Architecture: Adopts a lightweight, modular, and adaptive data architecture that accommodates new data sources and technologies seamlessly, future-proofing your data infrastructure.
Conclusion
With Metaspace as its engine, MECBot propels your business ahead of the curve, turning complex, high-volume, and high-velocity data into a streamlined powerhouse of just-in-time insights.
Never let slow data drag you down again – achieve Data Agility within days (not months or weeks) and transform data chaos into swift, smart, and goal-based decisions. Switch to just-in-time decision-making with MECBot and steer your business toward success at warp speed!
Learn more about MECBot here, or request a demo to learn more about how we can address your data needs.