Top 7 considerations when choosing a data platform
Data is at the core of every business, and the data landscape is constantly evolving, with technological innovations, compliance and risk. As organisations in a digital age, we use data to gain insights, inform decisions, perform tasks, develop solutions and provide services to customers.
For these reasons alone, choosing a data platform is a critically important decision. Your choice will have an impact across the organisation.
In this blog, 9Yards Senior Consultant Tatiana Konnova highlights 7 considerations when choosing a data platform that supports your organisation’s digital transformation.
1. Start with an approved data strategy
Before choosing a platform, ensure you have an approved data strategy in place, with leadership buy-in. A data strategy normally includes:
- Key business use cases and needs
- Links to the current state and future state of the organisation and an outline of key focus areas for development. For example, these might include data governance, data storage and destruction policies, along with data processing, integration, reporting, analytics
- Strategic vendor alignment, identifying which vendors are a good fit for your organisation, skill profile, business goals and culture
- An ‘organisational delivery model’ that defines roles and responsibilities of business and technical teams in the process of delivering data products.
Your data strategy would normally also include a strategic roadmap for data. This is a plan or program of work that includes choosing a data platform. This puts the platform choice in the context of strategic business objectives and connects it to related activities, ensuring your choice of platform aligns with the broader vision for digital transformation.
2. Have technical architecture assets in place
An Enterprise Technology Target State, Data Principles, and Data and Integration Reference Architecture are key guiding artefacts to use when selecting, designing and implementing a strategic data platform.
Collectively, these artefacts provide:
- design guidance for choosing cloud or on-premise technical solutions, including a data platform
- an agreed set of principles that guide choices based on scalability, performance, security, and integration characteristics
- an understanding of technical patterns the future data platform should support, covering the complete data lifecycle including data capture, creation, collection and data archiving and destruction
- high-level functional and non-functional requirements that inform the choice of one data platform over another, including support for AI/ML
- an explanation of how the chosen data platform will fit into the organisation’s data ecosystem
required features to support the organisation’s data governance and data quality objectives.
3. Information security policy
Your information security policy sets out the organisation’s requirements for a data platform, including decisions about where your data will be hosted.
An information security policy is essential. Compliance requirements for data privacy and data security are continuously evolving.
4. Technical skills
An updated data platform – indeed the whole digital transformation journey – may require new skills that don’t currently exist in the organisation.
You may need to train existing staff or recruit new team members. These decisions can also have an impact on culture and morale, so they may require change management. The current skills shortage in Australia and globally may also impact your decision.
Vendor skills are also a consideration. Are you partnering with a vendor that has the right skills to deliver the new solution into production? Can they support you during implementation and beyond?
5. Vendor management
Data platform choice will come with ongoing vendor management. Managing the vendor relationship requires specific skills and tools, so consider if you have these skills in-house already or if training or new staff are required. You might also decide to manage as much as possible within the organisation, which may require recruitment of specialist team members. or outsourcing to a third party.
6. Cost management
Most cloud-based (SaaS, PaaS) vendors charge their platform users on a “consumption” basis. Your technology budgets will need to be able to absorb higher platform costs if consumption increases. Being able to plan for cost increases or reductions and monitor consumption reports is an important consideration when choosing a data platform.
7. Organisational data literacy
Regardless of the technology choice you make, your decision will be more successful with informed leadership buy-in, effective governance and efficient data use. These translate to data literacy in an organisation and it’s often hard to achieve.
One approach is to identify ways to educate and inform business users about how to comply with data governance rules. This includes how to use data consistently and correctly with assistance of business glossaries and standardised visualisation techniques.
If your organisation is committed to data democratisation (providing data access to everyone in the organisation), it will be important to select a data platform that makes end user access as open as required. You’ll also want to commit to ongoing data literacy training across the organisation.
9Yards are experts at data platform selection
From developing a data strategy, to vendor selection, change management and identifying and filling skill gaps, 9Yards has extensive experience in selecting the right data platform for clients across many sectors. If you are considering an upgrade to your data platform, arrange a preliminary discussion with one of 9Yards’ expert Digital Transformation Consultants for technology agnostic, holistic advice that considers the needs and business goals of your organisation.
