Managing the ever-increasing speed with which your organization generates and utilizes data is key to success. For most enterprises, the use of their big data is intimately tied to digital transformation (DT) initiatives. Adopting the necessary technologies to keep up with an enterprise data flow is a must to stay competitive.
With this business reality in mind, some questions arise: What will be big data’s role in the future for business? How will IT adapt and grow? And how will this growth affect ITOps and developer processes today?
We sat down with some industry leaders—Ahmed Kamran Imadi, Big Data Solutions Engineering at a Fortune 100 Financial Institution; Mark Kidwell, Chief Data Architect at Autodesk; and Satish Nekkalapudi, Sr. Manager at Magnite—to discuss these questions.
In our webinar, these experts shed light on the role of big data in business today, the skill-sets needed to keep up with the growth of big data, and how DT has affected the role of big data in their organizations.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the incorporation of a variety of digital technologies and trends into all facets of a business organization. It includes the adoption and use of cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, hybrid IT, machine learning, and automation in various business areas like communication, resource management, HR management, accounting, inventory, and more.
DT fundamentally changes how businesses operate by improving their existing practices, eliminating outdated approaches, and finding better ways to increase the value delivered to customers. DT signals an organization’s shift into using modern methods of operations. It marks an enterprise’s constant search and discovery of new business models and new revenue streams, driven by the need to meet the ever-changing customer expectations around their products and services.
Why is Digital Transformation Important?
In 2020, 54% of the world’s business organizations put DT initiatives on top of their technology priorities. This year, that figure slightly increased to 56%.
These majority statistics show that major business sectors are embracing DT. We see DT in the banking and financial industry, in manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, real estate, and more.
Businesses are expected to spend more on DT projects in the coming years. Enterprises all over the globe spent $470 billion to push their DT initiatives in 2020. Experts predict that by 2025, total spending on DT will breach the $1-trillion mark.
But why spend this much? What makes DT important?
Here’s a simple answer: It enables businesses to keep up with and meet customer demands as they change and emerge. In addition to such agility, DT significantly enhances operational efficiencies across the whole organization while keeping their costs manageable.
All these advantages contribute to an organization’s adaptability in the future as well as resilience to crisis. Thus, businesses that are well into their transformation will be more likely to survive and recover in the event of disruptions. These businesses will also be able to compete better in an economic climate that constantly changes due to evolutions in technology.
DT is a constantly shifting and evolving process, driven by the changing demands and expectations of both consumers and internal stakeholders. This can make it a challenge. Enterprises often deal with a number of digital transformation challenges. It can be hard to ensure the success of a DT endeavor. It’s complex, demands resources, requires cooperation from multiple departments, as well as several budgetary considerations.
However, with the right guidance and adherence to the principles of DT, teams can properly prepare, plan, and implement their strategy.
How DT Affects the Role of Big Data
When asked about how enterprise DT affects big data, Kidwell said he believes it was key to unlocking a slew of behavioral insights.
“One of the key things digital transformation meant for analytics, or data processing teams, was that the products were always online, always available to the company’s customers and users… And with that came this flood of data—usage data or behavioral data—followed by this huge demand to process that data and derive insights from it.”
Since then, companies have been using unlocked behavioral insights to drive business processes, such as marketing and other common analytics use cases.
“They’re using these insights to drive analytics of product behavior or performance, crash reporting, other insights, and basically predicting things that the customers didn’t know about the products (or the way they’re using the products).”
Digital Transformation Leads to Business Transformation
For Nekkalapudi and his work at Magnite, enterprise digital transformation has enabled a lot of optimizations on their platform.
“We were able to reduce the bidding, understand the bidding patterns, and reduce our bidding per instance. This enabled us to power up our ad engine clusters, which enabled the whole amount of data that passes through our ad bidding platform.
We jumped from tens of billions of requests to hundreds of billions of requests with a minimal set of changes—completely powered by our data science team.”
Magnite’s reporting and analytics platform also helps them slice and dice data for their customers within seconds, compared to other partners that take hours.
“We’ve also improved transparency in the whole process by providing log-level data access, and enabling our brand production team to identify any malicious actors and cut them off as early as possible.”
Hear More about Enterprise Digital Transformation
This is merely the beginning of the discussion between these industry experts. In the full webinar, the attendees continue to talk about:
- The relationship between big data growth and business growth;
- How big data is changing ITOps, and how operations and development teams are adapting;
- The evolution of company culture in a changing landscape;
- …and much more.
Find out what the future holds for big data, and how organizations should evolve with it.