5 ways Data Vault delivers value

Data analytics consultants, Eckerson Group, predicted a year ago that 2020 would be ‘The year of Data Vault‘.

According to our CEO Neil Strange that has certainly proved to be so. Businesses are gathering pace with their plans for 2021 and beyond, with digital transformation increasingly important in many walks of life.

All the evidence we are gathering concurs that Dan Linstedt’s Data Vault 2.0 methodology is now firmly on more and more people’s radar – if it wasn’t already – in the world of data analytics and data platforms.

Our own website showed a 150% growth in traffic in 2020, as more and more visitors seek answers relating to Data Vault, with our educational page ‘What is Data Vault’ at the top of the list. In an address to members of the Data Vault Alliance at its latest webinar, Neil outlined five areas of value that companies seeking solutions for their data platforms are looking for – which you can listen to by clicking here.

Many businesses and organisations are modernising legacy in their systems. And of course, migrating to the cloud – an option that just a few years ago might have been considered too complex and costly – seems more desirable and achievable for firms, no matter how complex the task.

Neil’s experiences across many clients suggest these five areas of value are key, in their Data Vault projects:

1) Competitive advantage

Every business that considers such a switch, or transformation of existing operations – not just in terms of its data warehouse, but also in terms of automating, modernising and re-engineering their business – is seeking to gain a competitive advantage.

Existing trends have accelerated as organisations all around the world have had to adapt to the coronavirus epidemic.

2) Operational efficiency

Pressures to improve the bottom line are driving the need for improvements in operating efficiency. Data platforms can support this considerably, by delivering timely accurate analytics, enabling data science and removing obstacles caused by a lack of access to good data.

Modern architectures such as Data Vault 2.0 are scalable and allow data to be loaded in parallel, and thanks to the services being offered by cloud providers such as Amazon, IBM and Google, the price is continuing to fall.

3) Improved customer service and personalisation

Companies are also seeking returns through improved customer service. Analysis of greater and greater amounts of data – previously unavailable – gives greater insights into customer behaviour and preference, allowing firms to increase personalisation of both products and services.

4) Satisfying regulatory and compliance requirements

Increased regulatory pressures and the need for compliance – whether it is privacy through CCPA in the USA, GDPR in Europe or financial reporting with FRS17 in financial services, plus security needs – all drive the need for better management of data.

5) Delivering the benefits previous projects failed to deliver

Some companies are seeking solutions after other transformations have failed to deliver the anticipated benefits. Many have been drawn in by the promise of “vendor specific silver bullet solutions” that haven’t delivered. Problems with data silos, a lack of integration – or the inability to serve new data science requirements, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, contribute to the need for new data platform solutions.

How does Data Vault 2.0 help deliver these benefits?

Many companies, especially those dealing with legacy data warehouse issues, have struggled with the complexity and cost of modernising, or trying to replace their data platforms – and/or migrating to the cloud. To the point that those obstacles – cost being often the biggest – mean many executives are left scratching their heads on getting board approval in the first place, or with large headaches when trying to implement them.

Now thanks to Data Vault’s agile nature, those migration projects can be broken down into smaller and shorter incremental steps – often lasting a matter of weeks rather than a typical 18 months – reducing the risk of failure as a result.

Another great benefit from going down the Data Vault road is increased automation especially in the process of loading and transforming the source data. This allows organisations to rely on smaller, skilled teams to build and run their data platforms. Automation means the staff are freed-up to concentrate on adding value to data analytics, business intelligence and data science.

Data Vault users have full access to the data’s origin, and its accurate and auditable lineage tracks. What happens to it, and how it moves or changes over time. So problems can be traced back to the root cause, saving significant amounts of time and resources, which improves the efficiency of any business intelligence (BI) set-up, and reducing the time it takes to obtain the insights required.

Consequently, not only can companies understand where their data came from – and how and when it was transformed along the way – they can extract as much value from their data as possible, while also maintaining compliance with audit and data protection requirements.

Data platform projects also drive requirements for improved data management and governance to ensure data is not only controlled, but increasingly respected by its users. Improved Information Governance and data stewardship increases ownership driving up data quality, making it easier for people to do their jobs effectively.

Finally, more and more businesses want data managed in real time, or as close to it as possible – and need an architecture that will accommodate this.

So if you recognise any of those five areas of value as being relevant to your organisation or company and a change in your data platform could bring, you certainly should be considering utilising Data Vault 2.0 – and there has never been a better time to start.