DataOps for Analytics

The transformative potential of accelerating analytics-ready data and insights

Analytics-driven transformation – Clearing the operational hurdle with DataOps

Data-driven transformation is a mandate for today’s CIOs and CDOs, and it’s likely to remain so for a long time. Modern data architectures, together with new services powered by AI and advanced data science and data analytics techniques, are making it possible to fully use analytics throughout the organization and drive data literacy.

Although new infrastructure – such as cloud data warehouses and lakes – and new technologies such as data streaming enable businesses to significantly increase data availability, that’s not the only piece of the puzzle. You still have to address the people component - and the processes to make data always available and analytics-ready.

Your processes have to change – to deliver greater agility, faster time to value, and real-time data for users in every area of your organization. Fortunately, DataOps is here to help.

“The real focus and benefit of DataOps is as a lever for organizational change, to steer behavior and enable agility.”

“Innovation Insight for DataOps”, Gartner¹

What is DataOps for Analytics?

Gartner defines DataOps as “a collaborative data management practice focused on improving the communication, integration, and automation of data flows between data management and consumers across an organization.” 1

It’s a methodology that encompasses the adoption of modern integration technologies, the processes that transform data from a raw to ready state, and the teams that work with data. The goal is to bring both sides of the data-delivery equation into alignment. The data manager’s requirements for control, transparency, and auditability. And the business user’s need for real-time, analytics-ready data – to ultimately extract the most value for the enterprise.

How can DataOps impact your organization?

Data-driven transformation requires an agile approach across the entire data supply chain, from your infrastructure to your processes and people. DataOps helps you bring all those elements together, accelerating cycle times and improving performance with the potential to transform your organization in a number of ways:

1. A boost in data literacy

Data literacy is quickly becoming a strategic initiative for CIOs, CDOs, and other C-level executives. Half the battle is closing the skills gap. The other half is making trusted data as easy as possible to access, use, and mine for insights – for the entire spectrum of users. Modern data integration and management can rapidly accelerate this process, centralizing control while democratizing access.

2. Faster, more agile analytic processes

To become truly data-driven, agility and real-time insights are key. DataOps allows you to move data as it’s changed, in real time. Automating manual tasks reduces analytics cycle time, freeing resources for higher-level focus. And flexible integration solutions let IT change a source or target without disrupting the infrastructure – so you can stay agile as technology evolves.

3. Data democratization

DataOps lets you make vetted, governed data universally accessible. Instead of limiting analytical insights to data scientists, you can extend them to a broad set of line-of-business users with focused expertise. And this includes users at the front lines and edges of the business – via mobile devices, IoT, and at any point of customer interaction – helping optimize operations and customer experiences.

4. Continuous governance throughout the data delivery lifecycle

Smart data catalogs, data indexes, and other tools enable IT to design a modern governance process with the access controls needed to avoid data-decision variability and chaos. And IT can achieve scale and agility by leaving data in lakes, warehouses, and other repositories on-premise and in the cloud. This gives users timely access to enterprise-ready data while layering in quality assurance with role and responsibility designations that bring more of the right data to the right people at the right time.

5. Fuller collaboration

DataOps makes it faster and easier for data scientists and business analysts to join forces – and for discrete business units to collaborate around the analysis of data and sharing of results. In fact, DataOps is a great vehicle for creating the long-sought-after business/IT alignment that tends to be elusive as companies grow. And unlike traditional task forces that tackle niche issues, DataOps affects the entire organization by delivering valuable data to every business user when they need it, in a consumable and governed way.

Executive Briefing: DataOps for Analytics

This executive brief explains how DataOps can change processes to be more agile, valuable, and deliver real-time data for users in every part of an organization.

Read DataOps Executive Brief

Enabling DataOps for Analytics-Ready Data with Qlik

Qlik Data Integration automates real-time data streaming, cataloging, and publishing, so you can quickly find and free analytics-ready data — and take action on it.
Diagram showing how the Qlik Data Integration Platform uses data to provide business insights.

  • Real-Time Data Streaming (CDC)

    Extend enterprise data into live streams to enable modern analytics and microservices with a simple, real-time and universal solution.

  • Agile Data Warehouse Automation

    Quickly design, build, deploy and manage purpose-built cloud data warehouses without manual coding.

  • Managed Data Lake Creation

    Automate complex ingestion and transformation processes to provide continuously updated and analytics-ready data lakes.

  • Enterprise Data Catalog

    Enable analytics across your enterprise with a single, self-service data catalog.
“Business executives at mainstream corporations are quickly grasping a central premise that executives of data-driven companies have well understood: The speed with which the enterprise can get value from its data matters – a lot. Accelerating that timeframe . . . should be a core focus of any Chief Data Officer.”
Randy Bean, “Time to Value: The Currency of Data Operations,” Forbes
“DataOps will teach us how to build a nervous system of data that brings awareness and power to every part of our organizations”
Dan Woods, Early Adopter Research
“Data-driven transformation can help from a new revenue and business standpoint, but it doesn’t work unless you’ve got your internal workings streamlined as well.”
Eileen Corrigan, VP/Publisher, TechTarget

Learn more about DataOps for Analytics with Qlik.