It is true. Knowledge empowers you and it empowers your business. As the information technology (IT) department, you are the holder of the key. IT has the ability to utilize technology to turn information into knowledge that empowers the business.

In a previous article, we discussed how analytics acceleration helps to deliver faster insights using infrastructure designed for complex analytics. In order to accelerate analytics, IT leaders need to become the architects of the future and employ a new data approach.

IT leaders who are looking to make sure that IT plays a greater role in driving the business forward will architect environments that employ data-centric design.

Key Areas for Data-Centric Design

Data-centric design will help your organization capture the largest volume and variety of data. It will help you efficiently locate data and applications. It will help you make better business decisions faster. Sounds easy enough, but to make this a reality, you’ll need to make sure that your team is ready to focus on three key areas:

  1. Intelligent data management and placement
  2. Rapid data ingestion of diverse types and sources
  3. Moving analytics closer to the data

Where is My Data? What is Important?

To architect a data-centric design, you’ll need to consider your business drivers in addition to the data that helps to tell the story of those drivers. Sometimes that data isn’t readily available or available quickly enough to help drive decisions. Sometimes it isn’t even your data, but data from third parties.

Consider these use-case scenarios:

IBM Helps TBV Maximize Ad Revenue

TBV, a Hong Kong-based television broadcaster needed get a more precise ratings forecast to maximize ad revenue. To achieve this, they had to integrate external social media data with over 1 TB of data from its web and mobile applications each month.

The Data-Centric Design: IBM Power Systems running DB2 with BLU Acceleration and Storwize v7000

IBM helps LSU use Hadoop to Analyze Genomics Workloads

Louisiana State University uses Hadoop to analyze over 3.2 terabytes of data. By investing in IBM compute and storage solutions, they were able to increase performance by 3x while using 2x fewer notes—a 9x improvement in terms of performance per server.

The Data-Centric Design: IBM Data Engine for Hadoop and Spark—Power Systems, Spectrum Scale

Petrol Improves Sales with Historical Customer Data

Petrol and IBM worked to design a data-centric solution that helped the European retailer use historical and transactional customer data to uncover new opportunities and improve sales. Petrol reduced data analysis of each new transaction from minutes to seconds. This allowed them to deliver new personalized cross-sell and up-sell promotions at the point of customer contact.

The Data-Centric Design: z Systems with IDAA

The Future of Data-Centric Design

To start moving toward data-centric design means diving into the world of dark data, third party data, and your own data that you capture, but don’t capitalize on.

Consider this: Less than 1% of the data generated every day is mined for valuable insights.

Traditional data capture and analysis models are slowing progress. Data-centric design is a new vision for computing that places the processing where the data is stored. Early adopters of this vision are in research laboratories and universities, but increasingly, businesses are tapping into their mountains of unstructured data to help them make business decisions.

IBM – Design for Cognitive Business

Analytics acceleration and data centric design are at the core of IBM’s Cognitive Business concept. In the weeks to come, we’ll talk more about how those foundational elements can help organizations build with collaborative innovation and deliver these solutions through cloud platforms.

Watch for future blogs on this topic to finding out more about how your business could adopt these concepts, or schedule a consultation to start building your own cognitive business story.

If you liked this blog, you also might like:  Cognitive Computing: Turning IT Operators into IT Innovators

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Big Data and Analytics

Businesses and governments worldwide are being challenged to make sense of data and gather valuable insights from structured and unstructured data that are emerging from a variety of sources such as videos, blogs and social networking sites. To meet growing client demands in today’s data intensive industries, IBM has established the world’s deepest and broadest portfolio of Big Data and Analytics technologies and solutions, spanning services, software, research and hardware.Flagship Solutions Group helps clients tackle these big data challenges in virtually every industry – from public safety to healthcare, retail, automotive, telecommunications, and everything in between.As evidenced by our broad big data solutions portfolio, powered by IBM, consulting services, capabilities around cloud and capabilities around traditional software deliveries, we offer the full spectrum of analytics capabilities organizations need to handle big data and extract value from it — from descriptive, predictive and prescriptive to cognitive, including predictive capabilities that allow users to model once and deploy broadly on both structured and unstructured data. Effectively harnessing unique insights from big data can drive better business outcomes, helping businesses grow, attract and retain customers, improve the intimacy enterprises have with their clients and understand more about customers – how to anticipate their needs and provide more targeted and relevant marketing and services. Learn more by exploring our many content pieces. 

  • IBM Big Data in a Minute: Drive Smarter Business Decisions with Data & Analytics

  • http://ibm.co/1zTI11oJohn Wiley & Sons partnered with IBM to shift strategy and increase delivery of digital publications.With IBM PureData for Analytics, John Wiley & Sons analyzes its data in new ways, for example: basing business decisions, like which titles to publish, on solid, data-backed insights.

  • Infographic: Invest In Data Science

  • The question, why data science, is no longer relevant—rather, the question is how to do data science? Learn about the technology and tools that are available, and build a culture that embraces skill building and innovation. Check out this infographic to see stats on why investing in data science is vital and what companies are doing in this space. 

  • IBM Cloud Data Services unlocks the full potential of a hybrid cloud infrastructure

  • In the digital era, data is exploding with uncanny speed, filling all available space. Not surprisingly, then, data has taken up prominent residence in the cloud.Does your media enterprise enjoy the best of both on-premises and cloud environments? Use IBM Cloud Data Services to gain real-time insights from your data no matter where it lives, all while enjoying the power and scalability you need to make the most of the insights you uncover.To learn more about IBM Cloud Data Services, explore the new era of hybrid infrastructure at https://ibm.biz/dash-db-free.Subscribe to the IBM Analytics Channel: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_…The world is becoming smarter every day, Learn more.

  • Infographic: Turn Data and Analytics into a Competitive Advantage

  • Business leaders recognize that applying analytics across all data types is changing operations and decision making for the better. Learn more in this infographic. 

  • Report: Analytics in a Dash

  • This IT Managers Journal looks at how new cloud-based data warehousing and analytics solutions can level the playing field for businesses that don’t have resources to deploy sophisticated data warehousing and Big Data  infrastructure, and how they can offer enterprises of all types and sizes access to advanced analytics tools that can quickly turn raw information into real business advantage.