WINNING WITH DATA

DR CHRIS COOPER, DIRECTOR AND GENERAL MANAGER, LENOVO DATA CENTRE GROUP MEA, ON HOW TO USE DATA TO TRANSFORM BUSINESSES.

What is data centered?

‘The Data Centered’ are the leaders who seek to understand more about the power of their data, and that empower their people to use their data - they are the visionaries and tech optimists who understand the value of data, and see data’s potential to dramatically accelerate their organisations, improve their Industries, and solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

The pandemic has served as a catalyst for digital transformation. Technology has the power to overcome the noise about volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) and help businesses stay connected with their customers, to innovate and to thrive.

Data, supported by cutting-edge technologies such as AI, 5G, edge computing, IoT and blockchain, can be the source of innovation, and although we are generating seemingly endless amounts of it, if people know how to harness it, learn from it and then springboard from it, their organisations can stay ahead of the curve.

How can CIOs measure the success of their digital transformation efforts?

Every organisation will have different metrics and measurements for the success of their transformation projects. What Lenovo believes is that for digital transformation to become an ongoing process of successful outcomes, organisations need to understand data, and empower humans to use that data.

In the new economy all businesses are data businesses, and every employee works in a data ecosystem. A data strategy, focusing on skills, literacy and

analysis therefore, needs to be put at the heart of an organisation.

Data needs to be democratised. We need to broaden the access to data beyond conventional IT and data science roles. The most important responsibility business and IT leaders hold is to ensure that all of their users are part of the journey and no-one is left behind.

There are few roles within any organisation that wouldn’t benefit from data skills. Supporting data literacy and encouraging ongoing development are essential requirements in any modern workplace.

Data and technology are the engines of digital transformation, but people will always remain the drivers. It’s critical to bring the people along with the technology.

Why do businesses need to put people at the centre of their technology decisions?

Data on its own is powerless. Data doesn’t transform the world, people do. It takes smarter, more ambitious, more driven humans to bring it to life, apply it, derive its meaning and give it purpose.

It’s not the data that makes the decisions, but the people interpreting it and presenting it in order to suggest a way forward. Technology is not about dehumanising the workplace or displacing the softer or more strategic human abilities; data, and artificial intelligence, should augment our unique human qualities to guide business decision-making and result in better outcomes.

The role of humans in a data ecosystem is to understand the problems the machines are able to solve and design the systems to meet their intended outcomes. The user’s role, therefore, shifts from the ‘doer’ to the problem-solver, using their analytical and reasoning skills to improve the quality of their output.

How do you support the new normal and remote work arrangements of your clients?

One year after the global remote work revolution, the shift to work from home (WFH) and work from anywhere (WFA) is already resulting in profound effects on businesses’ digital transformation as well as data security concerns. zz z

According to Lenovo’s new Future of Work and Digital Transformation study, which surveyed 8,000 employees and IT decision-makers (ITDMs) across 14 markets, a vast majority of businesses (83 percent) expect to work remote at least half the time. Most employees (83 percent) want a hybrid work model post-COVID, which businesses say are more than happy to accommodate because they know it’s a way to drive employee engagement and attract new talent.

To enable remote work, we have seen an increased usage of personal devices for work; wider adoption of collaboration cloud and software; and a heightened focus on data security among IT functions across businesses of all sizes. The main challenges presented by remote work is slow or unstable internet connections and lack of IT support, especially for smaller businesses.

Lenovo suggests that businesses may want to consider always-connected PCs with integrated LTE or 5G as a way to offer employees freedom from reliance on the home Wi-Fi network and to provide higher security. Smarter devices, services and software solutions that can self-diagnose and pre-empt IT issues can also help small businesses that don’t typically have a robust IT support team.

Businesses of all sizes will need to grapple with how best to keep themselves secured with the integration of partner security services and commit to a more agile business-centric approach to security that also focuses on the cloud and data.

What is your best practices frameworks for managing data assets?

Digital transformation is impacting all areas of IT and business, having profound effects. One key recurring theme is the increasing need to gain insights from exponentially growing volumes of data. This data can be structured or unstructured and come from sources as diverse as traditional IT systems, social media or sensors embedded in a smart infrastructure. Whatever the source, businesses are increasingly reliant on mining its content, often in near real time. It is for this reason that data is often being compared to oil as a core natural resource fueling our lives and businesses.

Today companies are leveraging data to improve customer experience, open new markets, make employees and processes more productive or create new methods of business. All of this to build competitive advantage. This is a very different environment from that which set our expectations of data in traditional IT.

With the growing adoption of cloud computing, business enterprises and other organisations face a wide variety of choices in defining and deploying the necessary IT infrastructure. This includes on-premises dedicated installations, on-premises private cloud, public and hosted clouds and a combination thereof. Application software aimed at doing specific business tasks can now be deployed across such a hybrid landscape. However, making the necessary data available requires careful considerations along a number of dimensions. The as-a-service deployment model for data flow is taking hold and brings a need for proper governance and security along with it. Traditional data centers are expanding to include edge infrastructures, whether they are in branch offices, remote locations or on mobile assets owned by an organisation.

The ultimate success in creating a data-centric architecture that enables an organisation to become data-driven is based on an ongoing convergence between the disciplines of highperformance computing (HPC), AI and Big Data.