Dealing With Data Chaos: An Integrated Approach

By Vivek Naidu, Vice President Information Management, Kodak Alaris India 

Businesses today are dealing with an exponential growth of data. Not only are there vast amounts of paper documents that need to be converted into business-critical information, there is also an influx of digital documents coming through in various formats – such as video, phone calls, chat logs, web analytics and more – from multiple sources including social media, customer care centers, online and offline.

By 2020, IDC predicts digital data will exceed 44 trillion gigabytes. 90% of that data growth will be in the form of unstructured data. The organizations that can successfully transform data chaos into business opportunity will differentiate themselves from their competitors and win in the marketplace. The first step to resolving data chaos is digital transformation.

Companies today are looking for digital transformation to create efficiencies, improve decision-making and customer experience, and pave the way to new opportunities. Gartner rightly points out that successful digital transformation efforts require the ability to harness technology, which can be complex, because new solutions need to meet business requirements and more importantly, integrate with existing solutions and applications.

Given the scale and complexity of data an integrated approach is required to be able to capture, process and share information efficiently. Every business has unique information capture needs, and it can be complicated to turn documents into information due to:

• Specialized document formats

• Disparate document input points scattered from central and remote offices to mobile capture

• Requirements to identify and index captured information and route it into the right databases and workflows

• Processes to add capture tasks to the workload of busy staff

For digital transformation initiatives to succeed, CIO’s need to figure out where the greatest opportunities are to optimize the business and work with trusted partners to design and deploy the right solutions.
Across the organization, business functions that are powered by the combination of robust structure and defined data can become more quantifiable, predictive and prescriptive. Specifically:

• Marketing: Understanding and targeting customers

• Customer service: Improving customer responsiveness and interaction

• Sales: Increasing revenue and reducing the cost of sale

• Logistics: Understanding and optimizing business processes

• HR: Organizational and human capital quantification and performance optimization

• Manufacturing: Improving  machine and device performance

• Finance: Optimizing financial management, reporting and compliance

Here are a few basic requirements for a successful digital transformation:

• Robust products designed to integrate seamlessly with the existing business processes to handle the unique challenges

• Partners who understand niche business needs, with the expertise to deliver everything from cost-effective small-office solutions, to high-volume commercial environments; from straightforward capture to specialized, optimized workflows.

• Services to keep information capture solutions running flawlessly Successfully harnessing the power and promise of data, at scale, requires:

• A new ecosystem of consultants, system integrators, software companies and SaaS providers to deliver powerful solutions that meet the needs of each customer

• A new science for capturing, recognizing, and extracting information from data

• New technologies in the form of software, devices and cloud services for storing, sharing and integrating data with business processes and applications

In essence, the massive growth of data presents a tremendous opportunity for most companies to enhance –and even transform – their current businesses processes. Successful information capture turns data chaos into useful information that can increase operational efficiency, lower operating costs, improve customer service, accelerate decision-making, and deliver better business results.