Save to death or enabler for Digitalization PART i

Save to death or enabler for digitalization is the questions every organization should ask them self when constricting IT budget.

Without Business there is no IT but also without IT you cannot do business anymore and some years ago the change happens where the IT is enabler and not only costs as seen so earlier but why did we understood that.

Digitalization and getting the benefits out from the existing or new information cannot be done without investment witch actually restrict the organization to value from information and data. Pragmatic we can reduce our cost, we can optimize our work or we can create new business but why it is so difficult to make decisions witch reduce the cost, influence to our end user performance and might create new value.

Example, what has been the benefit for automating car manufacturing with robots's. I would say huge, and background to realize the benefits has been the decisions to make investment, spent money to build capabilities or reduce cost. Quite simple everyone can agreed - hopefully. To get minerals you need to have tools to dig - invest / spent money to get something.

Are we still in the mindset that business leadership does not understand the benefit of the data (to saved and deleted) and change in the end user behavior - with prioritizing of course.  Data witch has no positive value and not deleted turns to high risk of negative value through the EU GDPR requirements to prove and demonstrate the data usage or not. 

Some smarter has said that success starts from our own employees, when they are happy, your customers are happy and share that on the feedback, it is easier to get more business with good feedback witch means higher turnover with should mean better revenue and profit.

So we came back to basic questions, how we will offer the best tools, communication and collaboration setup witch fits best based on the user role and responsibilities regardless what device they use. 

How we made the accurate information available for the users instead of making available bunch of unvaluable data.

So where the data is stored. Application with data bases, network shares, local PC and cloud both consumer and business version.

Example how the data can be a risks regardless how it will be seen.

1.  End user use dropbox or OneDrive at his home PC saving legal and illegal data to PC
2. Cloud service will syncronize it to cloud witch is the reason to use those services
3. User configure the OneDrive or DropBox to work PC syncing the personal data from cloud to on premise
4. This folder might then be copied with scripts to corporate network share and backup systems OR folder is synced to OneDrive for Business to corporate Office 365 tenant.

So we can clearly see the security risk and risk for saving personal data - both legal and illegal - in corporate storage from where the organization does not have any information. From GDPR point of view and IF something happens, organization must go through these file to confirm that there is no personal data to to data subject who has made the request or who is part of the security breach. All these equals to cost and is a risk witch should be identified and discussed.

Users are smart and they try to find the way how they can work if organization does not allow for example way how to share data with partners and here the risks is that the corporate data will be synchronized via cloud services to their home PC witch should not allowed in any how.

And coming back to basic question, what we have done to protect us from this, what we have done to communicate with the end user what is allowed and what not, how we try to ensure that we don't have data in wrong place and keep unvaluable data in our storage. Normally the hardware upgrade means pragmatically to copy the same unknown data to new storage every 5 years. 

So what can be done to get the data visible and available, reduce the costs and automate the data archive and retention and does it make any value for us. I would say absolutely Yes, the legacy data can be available from one common connection point like SharePoint even if the data is stored to Azure blob storage. This is one example how to use Azure PaaS and Storage in the background. Moving the data to cloud also should have change impact to network connectivity, why to use more expensive MPLS connection while data is available from public cloud. 

What we have seen is the change in the small offices where the local file server and MPLS connection has been changed cloud storage and xDSL connection with Site to Site VPN solution through internet to corporate regional or main data center to allow the access to internal business application -witch actually can also be published through Azure services and fits nicely to web services.

Everything is related to everything

I recommend you to read the Avanade's blog by Wictor Wilen from Sweden, while it really works as a eye opener in many ways.

From Baby Boomers to Generation 2

It explain how different generations works and familiar with, witch actually opens great opportunity to change management for service adoption and penetration.

Second topic it brings is the idea what to use and when BUT here one key is the information not the technology.

As we can see Wictor has wider view and perspective to what tools used and where and linking it to the generational preferences and Priority/time sensity.

This is awesome and started to work when deployed BUT what happens to old legacy solution and data witch is the issue. Too often the transition project does not include funding to move the data from legacy to new to help organization to benefit from the investments.  End user experience cannot be seen very great if they have data what they use daily in File Servers, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online witch correlate to save to death but the root cause is deeper. It's the mindset to save all and it has been the way of working from the history together with open policy allowing users to save everything to everything and parallel to bemoan while not find the data or it's not accuracy and cannot find people who knows from the topic she/he is looking for.

Using monthly, subscription based services one key is the user profiling, so to add one additional layer to picture above is to profile users. What they services they use now, what services they will use in the future and then map to right monthly service subscriptions.

Secondly we can also mirror the information value compared from individual to organization and there understanding the usage of information means a lot. Different departments handle different type of information with own requirement to save the data. Finance has it own laws describing how long data must be saved where R&D must save technical data with it's rules. There is mandatory data witch can or cannot be deleted but there is huge amount of draft and temporary data with no need to save but still saved. This is creates the snowball effect and data berg (Veritas) like iceberg - only small part of the data is known and there is more data from where organization does not have understanding.

 

If you noticed, today's workplace also have bot's helping the user daily work witch means increased performance witch equals better productivity witch means better profit - simple or not?

So what to do if saved to death? Start to get together and agreed that now we need to use the saved money from earlier years - there is no free cheese like Rainmakers say..

So make a decisions, get the funding's and start to work, there is no short cut - unfortunately except bankruptcy if administrative fines set while not done anything.

So everything is related to everything but also the greatest benefits come from bigger change in both technical, process and user experience view. Still it is only work and mostly the technology is there, some available from OOB in latest Windows Server version or through commercial applications like Veritas Data Insight and Enterprise Vault for archiving with multiple storage option like SharePoint Online, Microsoft StorSimple with Azure, Azure Blob Storage and local SAN and storage system.

Weekly theme: Less Data is smaller risk

All thoughts and are my own

Following pictures shows what can be achieved with hard work witch also works for this article.

American Car Show Helsinki, Finland 2016 "Make it shine"