Big Data, Graph Data Who cares?

Featured article by Richard Branch, Vice President and General Manager for Semarchy, Ltd. 

Innovation is rapid, and companies at the forefront of innovation are often the most successful. So, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype about the newest thing: Big Data, graph database, artificial intelligence, Cloud, Software-as-a-Service, etc.

Technology geeks love this stuff but as a C-level exec running your organisation should you care?

Maximise Shareholder Value

What really matters is shareholder value and this means concentrating on key issues such as profitability, productivity and compliance. Data is now recognized as a corporate asset with significant tangible value. Getting value from that data is the real issue and understanding what information is needed to drive the business forward is the key skill CxOs bring to the equation. If having a better understanding of your customers increases the results of a marketing campaign by 3% or 4%, does it matter if the data was “big”? If more accurate information about your manufacturing processes improves your company’s productivity by a few percentage points does it matter if the system is in the cloud? A successful executive separates hype from real value to drive the business forward.

The IT world is moving towards ever more intuitive systems that allow business users to self-serve themselves with reports and analyses. The latest analytical and visualisation products open up a whole new world to management allowing them to gain insight into details about the running of their enterprise, all achieved with little or no IT involvement. For an example in the consumer space, look at Material Design, the human-interface science employed by Google, and how easily anyone can pick up relatively complicated concepts quickly when they are presented well. Gone are complicated interfaces, and priority number one is for it just to work without training, instruction guides, or technical wherewithal.

In my role running a software company I attend many events focusing on data management. At a recent event I was asked if our product runs on big data. I turned the question round and asked the person, “What are you trying to achieve?” They didn’t know, they simply replied that they had a data lake and wanted to see what they could get out of it! Lots, I imagine, but to me that’s rather like setting out on a journey with no destination in mind, all good fun but not exactly focusing on key business issues. Big data for big data’s sake is a trap to avoid.

As a CIO, you may be wondering which technology your company should use to solve today’s data management issues. To answer this question, you need to understand the requirements of the business and how management wants to steer the business forward; you must see the journey ahead.

As CFO, you will be concerned with maximising the value of the data stashed away in your organisation. For example, faced with ever increasing competition, understanding your customers and their buying patterns has never been more important. Streamlining logistics to match localised customer preferences and trends leads to productivity gains and increased margins.

As CEO, you must be concerned with all of these issues plus ever-increasing regulations whose stringent compliance can only be satisfied with sound data management practices.

The problem with big data is the fact that when you search for patterns in very large data sets with say billions of data points and thousands of metrics, you are almost certain to identify correlations and patterns that are caused by chance. These false positives can conceal weaker indications that may in fact be more significant to your business yet get ignored. It’s wrong to assume that more data equals better analysis. It should be that more “clean” data equals better analysis. Big data can quickly generate big problems and false results unless sound data management practices are in place.

Graphing or Grafting on a New Problem

What about graph databases? Returning to my original point, as a C-level exec your role is drive the business not worry about the technology. Graph databases use a concept of nodes and edges to describe relationships between items of data. The human brain thinks in terms of rows and columns, it always has done, from the first mathematical workings to hand written ledgers and files, we all love a list. Analytical tools present information in this way while visualisation tools create images to represent the rows and columns pictorially – bubble charts, spider webs, pie charts etc. Vendors of GDB based products claim certain performance advantages for managing hierarchical data. However, performance should never be a problem, all database storage technologies must be, and are, fully scalable. A graph database may be helpful in some situations, but it is no silver bullet.

So, why should you care about the newest, most hyped data solutions? Maybe you shouldn’t. It may not be glamorous but the quality of a company’s data and the governance surrounding it is fundamental to its value as an asset. Management of the key elements of data within an enterprise, known as master data or reference data, are crucial to this. The rise of the CDO (Chief Data Officer) seems to be an acknowledgement of this issue as they are the ones tasked with getting value from their organisation’s data. Crucially they must have the vision and skill to view both the business and its data holistically.

At its core, data is used to bring value to a business by equipping management with the information needed to make more accurate business decisions and the quality of these decisions is directly proportional to the quality of the data available. While has never been easier to analyse your data, poor data still means you may reach poor decisions.

Typically, the key elements of data in an organisation are spread around 15 to 20 core business applications such as ERP, CRM and Finance systems. The attributes of this data are well defined and their relationship with the business is well known. Despite what some may argue, this is not the random sea of data waiting to be released, it’s a pool of knowledge that can be organised and tapped. Pulling this together to create one reliable source of data ensures analytics are based on a sound footing. It may be fashionable to talk about big data, especially if you are a software company seeking an IPO, but unless you stand on a solid foundation, the newest innovation will fail to deliver the value you need.

Building the Foundation

What about this foundation? Master Ddata Management(MDM) takes all of your data spread amongst disparate applications and gives you a clean, trusted record of what really is going on. So, if you need MDM to set up a solid data foundation, should you just get whatever old, established MDM solution and be done with it? Not quite.

While much of this article advises caution in being swept away by the newest hot topic, foundational technologies like MDM are far from stagnant and interchangeable. New-school MDM technologies provide that foundation on your terms, with your business rules, and are flexible enough to accommodate whatever type of deployment you need now, and can adapt to future growth. As your business grows, and as new technologies come along that will actually move the needle, the foundation of clean data will have to be able to adapt.

Semarchy entered into a stagnant MDM landscape 6 years ago knowing that something different was needed. A pedigree in data management equipped it to achieve this – the management team previously developed a leading edge data integration suite that was ultimately acquired by Oracle – and they set about building a disruptive technology that would provide value to business more quickly and flexibly than previously achievable.

Defining the next generation of MDM, Semarchy introduced xDM, designed from the ground-up to be an agile, flexible, and intuitive MDM solution.

The software hype cycle may be of interest to the tech media, but it’s analyses based on a strong foundation of clean that provides the real business value.

Richard Branch

Richard Branch is Vice President and General Manager for Semarchy, Ltd. Previously Richard held senior positions at Oracle and Informatica. Having joined the nascent software industry in the ‘70s studying relational technologies he has worked in data management all of his career, specialising in Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Master Data Management.

Semarchy xDM introduces a new way to look at master data management. Based on the Google Material Design Language, a brand new interface drives an unparalleled user experience. Simplicity and responsive design powers ease-of-use for faster business value and adoption. Advanced collaboration, match and merge, enhanced survivorship capabilities and guided data authoring enable data stewards to support the most complex data management patterns. Graph analytics, interactive search capability, and RESTful Web Services deliver better navigation and interoperability for the most agile MDM solution in the world.