To free up funds for more strategic IT activities, organisations might benefit by paying more attention to efficient data management. Seizing opportunities for better data management could result in considerable savings while maximising value for business, says a report from Ventana Research, a research and advisory services firm
“A huge percentage of IT budgets and resources go to managing data-related operations and to maintaining the data integration and data synchronisation infrastructure underlying an organisation’s applications and systems,”says Mark Smith, CEO and executive vice president of research, Ventana Research. He adds that using a common technology to automate its data-related infrastructure activities, could help a company cut costs and release already allocated funds for innovation.
The report advocates for data archiving as an essential IT activity to be automated using data integration technologies. This enables archiving processes to be consistent across systems and applications, avoiding the costs of maintaining specialised archiving processes and custom interfaces for each application. By eliminating just six custom interfaces, an organisation can reduce its dependence on specialised labor and may save as much as $1 million annually, says the report. It says that utilising a common process and technology can ensure that the business’s data quality and integration needs are met efficiently and can reduce IT operating costs.
While there might be sound reasons to retire an aging application, too often they are kept on life-support because of the importance of the data. This approach that can cost millions of dollars a year per large application, says the report. In contrast, an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) approach ensures that data from retired systems is processed, archived and kept accessible as needed to other applications and users.
The report finds that in most sizeable organisations, systems more than 10 years old drive more than one-third of underlying business processes. The costs of maintaining point-to-point system interconnects across these processes are enormous. By standardising data integration across legacy systems, the organisation can reduce the headcount of technicians to two in the first year and to one individual the following year, saving $800,000 in year one and $1 million in year two.
Organisations frequently deploy custom-coded or proprietary routines to replicate and synchronise data across systems, and they support these costly routines with largely manual processes. By establishing a common method to integrate data across enterprise applications, an organisation can, according to the report, reduce the operating costs of these systems while eliminating the need for dedicated resources that specialise in supporting data integration for each application, database and custom programme.
