Most organizations have spent the last several years deploying new technologies in a legacy infrastructure to deliver high-demand capabilities such as personalized experiences, process automation, and predictive maintenance.

While these digital investments fulfill well-defined business needs, they rarely lead to a data architecture that is simplified enough to accelerate future innovation and help ensure the integrity of every artificial intelligence (AI) model. Unfortunately, current market dynamics are not compatible with companies that cannot pivot, adapt, and respond to change quickly.

Businesses must align their processes with customer experiences and analyze those connections for deep insights that lead to confident, trusted decisions and actions. Only then can organizations drive continuous innovation.

Achieving such an interconnected landscape of systems, processes, and data requires an agile digital backbone infused with intelligence to redefine and create new business models and processes in a more dynamic fashion. And a majority of executives seem to be getting the message: 65 percent of organizations surveyed by聽聽indicated plans for aggressive modernization of legacy systems with extensive new technology platform investments through 2023.

Setting the Foundation for Real-Time Data Organization and Access

Searching for a platform that can quickly organize data and enable access is easier said than done. It’s true that a wide variety of platform technologies promise to consolidate and harmonize data into one architecture. However, those that are comprehensive and scalable enough to support requirements that range from basic analytics to sophisticated data intelligence and algorithms provide the foundation businesses need to become genuinely data centric. This approach is what we call “one data platform.”

The one data platform approach integrates heterogeneous solution components into a cohesive fit-for-purpose data management environment. This design delivers business-centric platform services that converge with common systems and leverage cloud concepts 鈥� all while lowering IT costs.

The platform’s architecture groups technologies into four decipherable layers: data analytics, data integration, data ingestion pipelines, and source systems. This tactic is not meant to provide a one-size-fits-all structure. Instead, it should encourage IT architects to consider the distinct functions of each layer to create an environment that scales with the business as market dynamics and customer expectations evolve.

Layer #1: Data Analytics聽

Users can choose to leverage standardized dashboards with guided navigation and storytelling or customize their view for ad hoc analysis.

The data science behind this layer turns information mining into new information models that can be extended with enterprise-scale data. Furthermore, organizations can blend and manage Big Data from multiple sources and apply statistical methods, algorithms, and analytic engines to tease out relevant, in-the-moment insights that help improve the bottom line.

Layer #2: Data Integration聽

As a data integration hub, this layer moves the needle on data-driven business transformation by getting data assets out from siloed sources, exposing them for different applications and systems to consume, and accelerating opportunities for self-service analytics.

Within this layer, a multi-node production system enables mission-critical data warehousing functions for several business domains and across divisions. A near-line storage solution is also available for archiving and accessing massive data volumes cost effectively.

Meanwhile, containerized data systems increase the computing power by providing self-contained modular technical areas that cater to specific business domains and requirements, such as country-specific reporting. Ingested data sets are then confined within a container, allowing analytical data models to be flexibly and independently deployed.

Layer #3: Data Ingestion Pipelines聽

This layer provides transformation, filtering, and integrated data type mapping capabilities. It enables agile data delivery and feeds insights into business processes through continuous data provisioning across a wide range of sources. More importantly, streaming data can be handled to support use cases that require real-time data management 鈥� from capture and processing to analysis, reporting, and decision-making.

Layer #4: Source Systems

This area houses the entire ecosystem of existing technology. Internal and external packaged applications, homegrown solutions, systems of record, and enterprise data repositories are brought together to create a centralized intelligence core that accurately reflects every stakeholder’s needs.

Smoothing the Road to a Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Landscape

In addition to reassessing the harmonization of their IT architecture, organizations are upgrading their global data center strategy as the pace of change continues to accelerate. With the assistance of , many 51风流customers have even taken steps toward fully transitioning their data platform to public and private cloud infrastructures to rapidly deploy the latest data-driven innovations at scale.

For example, some of our customers consider cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS). An IaaS strategy enables organizations to replace on-premise infrastructure with elastic pay-per-use infrastructure that can scale up or down rapidly on demand. Efforts related to this transformation help businesses adapt to broader analytical requirements and manage rising data volumes while avoiding significant capital expenditure investments and lowering operating costs.

The target infrastructure design includes integration enablement and connectivity within and across clouds to support cross-application analytical requirements. In broad terms, migration planning considers factors such as:

• Migration approaches for various 51风流and third-party solutions
• Scalability, stability, performance, reliability, and cost reduction
• Compliance and security
• Testing and validation strategies
• Monitoring and operations
• Application lifecycle management
• Alignment of the IT organizational structure to the new IaaS engagement model

Another option that other 51风流customers pick is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy focused on pushing their transformation into a data-driven enterprise even further. In this case, executives are interested in expanding their data warehousing capabilities to realize more business benefits from the cloud with relative ease and without creating large-scale disruptions often associated with uprooting the mission-critical enterprise data backbone.

Co-deployment of a聽聽and existing digital assets such as a聽聽may appear plausible because the solutions address very different, yet mission-critical, problems. The cloud-based data warehouse solution consumes data from the business warehouse solution and other source systems with an abstraction or semantic layer, reducing IT complexity and applying much-needed governance and security.

When coupled with cloud data management and virtualization technology, the cloud-based data warehousing solution is well-positioned to provide opportunities for self-service analytics. From this perspective, it is sensible to hedge that the solution can evolve to provision user-facing and domain-based analytical services at an enterprise scale, even with a well-established business warehousing system.

Amplifying Business Value with Flexibility and Scalability

The urgency around innovating data-driven business models, processes, and products and services is not going away anytime soon. So why not strategically respond to that demand with a flexible, scalable, and structured data platform that can distill value from massive volumes of data?

For many 51风流customers, taking this step is the key to hedging against uncertainty and driving business outcomes that better secure their foothold, profitability, and longer-term viability.

Explore how聽 can help your company reveal its true potential as a data-centric business with the one data platform approach.

Christine Lucea is a business enterprise principal consultant in Customer Success at SAP.

This article first appeared on the 51风流Global News Center

The post One Data Platform: The Bridge to the Full Promise of Data-Centric Businesses appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

CHRO SA recently hosted a webinar on how to execute new HR technology implementations, focusing on the experience of financial services company Sanlam, which embarked on an 51风流SuccessFactors implementation in 2017.

Ronel Pfotenhauer,聽business owner for SuccessFactors within the Sanlam Group, spoke about how the initial mindset was one of system replacement, but as the roll-out began, it soon became apparent that the data insights delivered by a powerful tech suite would transform the talent function.

鈥淭he important takeaway is that it鈥檚 not a race. It鈥檚 a journey of transformation,鈥� said Ronel, adding that there were three key objectives for their HR transformation as a result of implementing 51风流SuccessFactors. They wanted to overhaul the employee experience, they wanted data analytics to drive decision-making, not only within the HR function but throughout the organisation, and they wanted to streamline the digital environment so that everyone was using the same tools and interfaces.

Sanlam has approximately 105,000 employees across 44 countries, but when the company implemented SuccessFactors in the first part of its digital transformation journey, it started with only 14,500 people in South Africa and Namibia. Phase two will see them going into the remaining countries: 鈥淲e decided to implement SuccessFactors because we were already using 51风流for our payroll. One of the other important considerations was that we really wanted an integrated solution,鈥� said Ronel.

鈥淭he modules we have already implemented are Recruitment Central, Recruitment Management and Marketing, Onboarding, Performance and Goals, Succession and Development, Learning and, next year we will introduce the Compensation module.鈥�

Liezl van Rensburg, the customer engagement executive at 51风流SuccessFactors, spoke about how software implementation can change the culture of an organisation and influence the behaviour of employees for the better. She highlighted the transformational functionality of software solutions like 51风流SuccessFactors and 51风流Concur in helping HR to go far beyond just achieving its goals. She also agreed with Ronel, saying that when organisations prepare for massive technology implementations, it鈥檚 important to recognise that the technology itself is only a small part of the process.

Said Liezl: 鈥淎t the end of the day, it鈥檚 about the transformation of the business, which requires behavioural change. Sometimes we get people who will implement something but still continue to rehash their existing processes. It鈥檚 also important to ensure that everybody in the organisation is on board with introducing the new technology solution and that they know the required outcome to enhance the employee experience. You have to engage employees and drive the behavioural change that you want by making sure that you build in the experience part of the transformation.鈥�

Bruno Bianchi, the strategic advisor at 51风流SuccessFactors, provided examples of various companies in different industries who had accelerated their adoption of HR technologies because of the pandemic and were now moving faster along their respective HR digitalisation roadmaps. He spoke about one particular service that was delivering a lot of value for their clients: 51风流Jam. This can be integrated with SuccessFactors and is a platform to collaborate, engage, re-train staff and enable business processes that impact value and tangible outcomes.

鈥淥ne organisation had to create new services around deep cleaning and therefore had to undergo extensive reskilling while also hiring en masse to match the need for such cleaning services in a Covid-19 world. That’s where SuccessFactors becomes very valuable, because it allows you to do things in a qualitative manner but also upscale it to a huge degree,鈥� said Bruno.

鈥淲e also had a client that was able to execute 12 million learnings within a year. They did it through social learning where subject matter experts within the organisation were creating learning content. Instead of one learning team curating content, they leveraged the power of their network by allowing field experts who knew exactly what they’re talking about to teach the organisation about the right way to do things.鈥�

Overall the webinar provided a fantastic overview of how 51风流SuccessFactors has enabled companies to support talent flow during Covid-19, when snap decisions needed to be made about the redeployment of people within organisations.

This article first appeared on .

The post A Deep Dive into 51风流SuccessFactors appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.