The legacy challenge
Most businesses do not have a ‘single customer view’ across their divisions or the products they sell. This not only prevents the business from benefiting from cross-selling and economies of scale, but also, means higher cost of maintenance. What is more, because these systems are so complex, and their replacement is potentially so disruptive, decisions are often taken to ‘patch’ them rather than finding an effective long-term solution. This is false economy as the longer the action is delayed, the more difficult its future fixing becomes. So much so, that some banks and large organisations now spend hundreds of millions of pounds per annum just to ‘keep the lights on’.
So what is the answer? Actually, it is simple. If data is readily usable at source, it would not need fixing at the point of use. In other words, managing business data in one place as a complete consistent and up-to-date set avoids the need to collate it form different systems and go through the complex, error prone and costly validation, cleansing and consolidation processes. This is exactly what the Datamation universal Information Platform (uIP) delivers.
The Datamation SiloSolve Service
How can businesses get to the clean post-silos world? We have designed our SiloSolve service, based the Datamation uIP to help our customers achieve this through addressing the challenges mentioned above and many more. The journey to post silos world may take time, many years or even a decade. But significant cost savings, and benefits can be achieved in months, or even weeks.
From our long consultancy experience, we found that in an IT infrastructure with 100s of business applications, less than 10% would be large systems that are relied on to run day-to-day operations. These are typically proprietary solutions sourced from major solution providers, and therefore tend to be well supported. The remainder, by contrast, are typically bespoke, or home-grown applications, that are not well documented or supported. But crucially, control and ownership of these applications resides internally within the business.
This is where SiloSolve can deliver immediate cost savings and benefits. We do this by initially focusing on migrating the small application and their data to the Datamation uIP platform. In parallel, where required we build interfaces from the Datamation uIP to any of the major systems that needs the data from the migrated applications. From that point onwards any new custom functions, e.g. analytics decision support applications, can be built as an uIP-powered application.
In other words, with SiloSolve, we can reduce a chaotic IT environment from 100s of disjointed systems and applications to as little as 10s connected and well supported solutions. In this way, we enable customers to reclaim ownership of their data, complete with:
- The ability to use data for multiple purposes thus delivering more value.
- Share it with any party they need to share it with – both externally and internally.
- Export it from the uIP at any time using easy to use export (and import) capabilities.
The next step is to create a holistic and dynamic view of the business data that provides a single customer or product view, as shown in the video below:
