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Your data and IT infrastructure involves a lot. Lots of systems, people, processes and applications that all work to squeeze the most out of your data.

With so many moving parts, things can get lost and overlooked. When that happens, your data and business strategies can start to suffer.

There’s no need to worry, we’ve got you covered with three ways to make sure your data and IT infrastructure truly support your data strategy.

1.Centralise your data storage

Over the last decade, data infrastructure has changed significantly as different technologies have evolved and become more accessible. For example, cloud-based computing and storage is one of the biggest changes everyone’s heard of, and it involves bringing an organisation’s data systems into a centralised cloud location. In parallel, there’s been a massive increase in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and edge computing, which spread an organisation’s data systems around and push them closer to the sources of the data.

These different sources of data and distributed locations of computing, along with other technologies you may be using, make data management complex. To help reduce this complexity, you can use a data warehouse to store your data and act as a single source of truth for your organisation.

A data warehouse will ensure your data, from whatever source, has a centralised home. It will also force a consistent structure on your data so it can easily travel between systems and be used across platforms. A data warehouse will also let you “democratise” your data and give more teams and employees access.

2.Standardise your systems

The proliferation of new data sources and infrastructure management tools introduces the risk of errors or flaws into your data, and it can bloat your environment by making it more complex than it needs to be. What’s more, some of your systems could turn out to be incompatible.

The solution is to standardise and consolidate. This doesn’t mean you should get rid of any applications or tools that are critical to your business. It does mean focusing on the flow of data throughout your company, identifying any problematic areas or inefficiencies, and finding a common solution that can fix or improve them.

Where possible, standardising and consolidating your systems can be done alongside automating them. That’s how change++ helped our client NSL save hundreds of hours processing the data from around 65,000 London vehicles and drivers every week. Their data pipeline involved manually processing the data from emails, importing into Excel, and then using that data across other systems. We created a bespoke, self-service option that allowed drivers to upload data themselves, automatically creating reports giving users better visibility and insight.

3.Align with broader business goals

Like all of your business intelligence systems, from self-service analytics to in-line dashboards and reporting, your data infrastructure strategy should be aligned with your broader business goals. This applies to almost every goal you might be aiming for as an organisation.

If you want to find new efficiencies throughout your organisation to save costs and free up the valuable time of your employees, then automating your processes can help. This could be automated reporting, or automated data formatting. Likewise, if you want more innovation and creative problem solving, then (as mentioned above) you might want to make your data more democratic by introducing an easily accessible data warehouse. Whatever your goals, to achieve them you need to make sure your strategy and technology are aligned.

At change++ we can help you to ensure your data infrastructure truly supports your data strategy. Get in touch to find out more.