Iftikhar Arif, General Manager, IT at Muller & Phipps Pakistan, outlines how we can protect customer data, maximize the potential of growth and ensure customer satisfaction by implementing the right data strategy.
Q. How crucial is setting up a data strategy for the growth of an organization? And how are you using data to accelerate performance?
A. Data Strategies ensure that the business data is well organized so that it is easy to move , share and use it efficiently. Since a good data strategy serves to reinforce the overall business strategy, it helps the departments to work with one another rather than against each other towards the growth of the organization.
M&P is a data driven organization having a rich history of customers & products historical data for different types of analysis. Taking a consolidated approach to customer, product, and market data increases our chance of future growth. We (M&P) always believe that smart data analysis can predict customer behavior, reduce churn, and identify opportunities for product upgrades or empower more personalized marketing and support communications.
Q. What are the key steps in selecting and implementing the right technology for data integration and making informed decisions?
A. Data integration is the practice of consolidation data from different sources with the purpose of providing a single view of entire data. Selecting and implementing the most appropriate data integration technology is challenging and involves choices like
· ETL vs ELT
· Open Source vs Closed Source
· Cloud Hosting vs on-premises
· Number of source connector,
· Level of support for Sources and destination
· Level of Automation required
· Task to be performed
· Level of Support for communication platforms
· Last but not the least, Security & Compliance.
A good data integration strategy is a cornerstone of a good business strategy and enables the management to take educated and market wise decisions.
Q. How can you identify privacy, security and governance risks when it comes to data security? And how to handle such risks?
A. Effective data governance ensures the data is consistent, reliable and never misused. So data security is an integral part of data governance. The common high risk areas or pressure points in data governance includes;
1. Information entry point
2. Policy Administration
3. Information endpoints.
Now, with the magnitude of data that pours into an organization, it needs constant and seamless monitoring of policies and controls. An absence of this leaves an organization to drown in the sea of information chaos. Thus, it is high time to embrace AI , machine technologies that allow organizations to automate the process of Information or data governance. This saves valuable corporate time from the mundane tasks of information governance & instead helps in focusing on enhancing customer experience.
Q. How Machine Learning and Cloud are making it easier for companies to adapt to new challenges?
A. Machine learning with cloud computing offers an ideal environment as it allows the complex machine learning models to work with large amounts of data provided by cloud computing. This helps businesses to uncover patterns and correlations in data that may not have been able to detect otherwise. Such an environment leads to a deeper understanding of data and thus better decision making.
Q. How to modernize data governance to help organizations compete in the knowledge economy? And how do you see in the near future the model of data driven organization?
A. I am a true believer of data modernization because it enables informed decision making by pulling data from the system more reliably. At M&P, it helps us to identify high value data combinations and different business integrations. Data modernization means moving data from legacy databases to modern databases. The value is not the data; it is what is done with the data. Data-driven organizations find value through data analytics, which is the process of analyzing data to acquire business insights. According to the survey, Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result.
