The Importance of Data Quality for Intelligent Data Analytics:

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1 The Importance of Data Quality for Intelligent Data Analytics: Optimizing the Financial and Operational Performance of IT White Paper

2 IT decisions are only as good as the data they re based on. And that data needs to be as complete, current and accurate as possible, or CIOs and their enterprises will likely find themselves at risk. The visibility challenge for today s CIOs and Managed Service Providers continues to get more difficult: how to get an encompassing and contextual view across the entire IT environment to make forward-facing business decisions. This task is dependent on the ability to gather and analyze the most comprehensive data possible a task complicated by the ever-changing, ever growing ecosystem of data sources. Between spreadsheets, siloed applications and systems, cloud-based solutions, multi-sourced service delivery, and countless other buckets of standalone data, it is increasingly difficult for IT teams to collect this information, put it in context, and process it for accuracy. The result: at any moment, it is estimated that 40 percent of an enterprise s IT data is wrong or missing. At any moment, it is estimated that 40 percent of an enterprise s IT data is wrong or missing. Setting the Right IT Goals Before an organization can start down the road of data collection for analysis, it s first important for all stakeholders to clearly understand and align their core objectives for IT. Regardless of the industry or marketplace, most IT organizations have the following four primary goals: 1. Leverage IT as a business driver 2. Provide agile service delivery 3. Effective governance and control of risks and compliance 4. Provide leading edge services while maintaining costs IT as a business driver: In the old days, IT was a cost function relegated to the back room. Today, IT has evolved into a strategic business asset with a constant presence in the boardroom. It empowers customers and users with new technologies and solutions to access products, services and information. Whatever the market opportunity, organizations now put IT at the tip of the spear to drive profits, open new markets, and provide new revenue streams through Digitalization. The challenge for CIOs and their teams is how best to keep up with the needs of the business and the constantly evolving world of IT including such massive opportunities and challenges that come with the consumerization of IT, mobile everything, Big Data and the Internet of Things. White Paper Optimizing the Financial and Operational Performance of IT 2

3 Agile service delivery: In order to leverage IT as a business driver, IT organizations must possess the skills, leadership, insight and resources to deliver the basis for impactful business change. Providing agile service delivery is a complex task that requires today s CIO to consider and employ the best internal and external delivery approaches. Increasingly, IT departments have evolved to become strategic sourcing teams that must manage onsite, hybrid and multisourced environments. While the benefits of multi-sourced approaches include agility and cost effectiveness, if not strategically managed, they also lead to additional risks. Enterprises must break free from the status quo scenario, and move up and over Gartner s Magic Quadrants. Poor IT data quality is the primary reason for 40% of all initiatives failing to achieve their targeted benefits. Governance, risk and compliance: Regardless of the delivery options employed, the CIO bears the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the overall performance, cost effectiveness and security across the environment. This requires visibility across all components of the IT ecosystem and providers, even when IT may not physically control all of the data. How can enterprises operate with speed, while governing risk? What assurances are there that infrastructure, data and systems being run by others on behalf of IT are completely secure, backed up and in compliance with governance standards? In essence: how do you know what you don t know? Delivering leading edge services, while maintaining costs: IT organizations are being pressed to be increasingly agile but to do so without expanding budgets at the same pace. The 80/20 dilemma still is in effect today, where 80 percent of IT s budget is spent on maintaining current legacy systems, while only 20 percent is available to innovate and launch new services and digital technologies. 85% of Companies Fail at Creating a CMDB Due to Bad or Missing Data. Because of data silos, IT teams are typically not able to have visibility across the entire IT environment. Without the ability to view the underlying infrastructure, applications and services, it is nearly impossible to accurately measure and validate the financial performance of IT, its cost effectiveness, or areas where costs can be shifted to new innovations or more effective delivery paradigms. Most organizations waste tens of millions of dollars, and in many cases hundreds of millions, because of the lack of visibility to proactively manage waste and IT s contribution to the business. White Paper Optimizing the Financial and Operational Performance of IT 3

4 Moving Beyond the Status Quo Not long ago, enterprises would sign multi-year, multi-million or billion-dollar outsourcing contracts to have their IT environments managed by a single IT service provider. At the time, this one-stop shopping approach was viewed as a way to hold a single vendor accountable for delivery, and to guarantee costs through contractual obligations to allow the company to focus on its core mission. However in today s more complex data environment, a diversified ecosystem of multi-sourced vendor contracts has become the new norm, with shorter contract durations across multiple providers. On the upside, enterprises are no longer overly reliant on a single provider to do everything, and can leverage domain experts in multiple areas of delivery. On the flip side, enterprises face increased risk from additional governance challenges and complexities that arise from managing multiple providers, and the providers themselves are confronted with the challenge of earning a profit in a shorter period of time due to short contract durations and the penalties tied to delivering SLAs. They have to be effective from Day 1. Blazent is the only solution built from the ground up to provide complete, accurate and auditable IT data that can drive actionable decisions on that data. CMDBs are a Start, Not the Answer As part of this multi-sourced environment, many enterprises have turned to IT Service Management Platforms to try to manage overall service requests and delivery. At the core of the ITSM system is the configuration management database (CMDB), a repository of information about the assets, configuration items, relationships and services in the enterprise. While these systems are valuable and effective to manage service delivery and workflows, the CMDB is only an operational data store. It is not designed for high performance processing, pulling in new data sources on the fly, or delivering the level of insight required for advanced predictive analytics. Despite enterprises desires to get more information out of their ITSM platforms, they have significant limitations for the kind of analysis needed. These limitations include: ITSM/CMDB only as good as the data inside them Missing key data sources Inaccurate, incomplete data views Lack of data validation Not able to pull in and process new sources on the fly Fixed in function, not an analysis platform Since ITSM platforms are limited to data focused on service management, relying solely on an ITSM platform handicaps an organization s opportunity to conduct data analysis and optimize overall IT performance. In short, these platforms don t possess the comprehensive data needed to analyze problems or identify opportunities: while great workflow and routing tools, they are not analysis engines. White Paper Optimizing the Financial and Operational Performance of IT 4

5 In order for IT to maximize its chances of meeting its goals, enterprises must break free from the status quo scenario, and move up and over Gartner s Magic Quadrants. The dated approaches of BYO in-house Master Data Management (MDM) systems, error-prone spreadsheets, silos of disparate data, large vendor suites lacking unified vision and deploying standalone ITSM platforms must be transcended, if an organization is to realize the prospect of harnessing the power of its data. So where do enterprises go from here? Identify, Access and Organize Process and Purify Analysis and Insight Predict, Prescribeand Optimize Blazent delivers a solution that spans the entire IT ecosystem and allows enterprises and service providers to advance to the next level of IT optimization. Quality Data Collection The key to performing intelligent data analytics is quality data collection. For most, especially those in the Big Data space, collecting quality data is governed by the three V s: Velocity how quickly and often information is collected; Volume how much data is collected; and Variety the different types of data collected. However, there is a fourth often overlooked, but equally important V, which is Validation. It doesn t matter how fast, how much or all the kinds of data an enterprise collects. If that data is inaccurate, it is useless for analysis. Of the many data collection and analysis solutions available, few are capable of satisfying all four V s to achieve reliable data analytics. To perform intelligent data analysis, enterprises need a solution that: Delivers immediate insight to the enterprise s current state Has real-time data as well as a complete history about people, processes and products Sources all relevant IT data Builds the foundation for predictive analytics and prescriptive modeling Deploys quickly and automatically, providing fast ROI Adapts to data volume, velocity and variety, while providing data validation White Paper Optimizing the Financial and Operational Performance of IT 5

6 Blazent is the only solution built from the ground up to provide complete, accurate and auditable IT data that can drive actionable decisions on that data. The platform s breadth of features and capabilities enables Blazent to take enterprises from the early stages of gathering data up the chain through data evolution, at which point enterprises can conduct relationship analysis, identity management and, ultimately, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Unique to Blazent s business is the company s ability to help both service providers and enterprises transform their businesses. With over $50 billion in outsourcing contracts and eight patents for data collection and processing, Blazent s customers include the largest, most complex organizations in the world. Coupled with its experience working with over 230 unique data sources, Blazent delivers a solution that spans the entire IT ecosystem and allows enterprises and service providers to advance to the next level of IT optimization. Blazent Capabilities Automatically incorporate data from any and every source regardless of overlap or level of completeness Process data changes as they occur; analytics in near real-time Normalize data with out-of-the-box matching Verify the accuracy of data before populating the CMDB Proactively identify specific operational gaps requiring immediate remediation Business Benefits Significantly reduce outages and time to resolution Reduce costs while optimizing IT delivery options Increase IT agility and effectiveness; keep up with new business opportunities Reduce operational risk and respond to audits with complete and accurate information Proactively plan for IT resources and budgets The Blazent Advantage For enterprises and service providers alike, data quality is fundamental to elevating their business and gaining a competitive advantage. Before putting that data to use, companies need total confidence in its completeness, accuracy and reliability. Only Blazent understands all data and its sources; only Blazent can take that 40 percent of missing or inaccurate data and reduce it to zero; only Blazent gives organizations 100 percent certainty that business decisions are based on solid insights into both the IT data and overall environment. Intelligent, actionable data: it s the key to reducing costs, controlling complexity and improving service levels. That s the Blazent advantage. White Paper Optimizing the Financial and Operational Performance of IT 6

7 About Blazent 1633 Bayshore Hwy Suite 341 Burlingame, CA Blazent is the leader in IT data intelligence. The Blazent Data Intelligence Platform is powered by the company s big data engine and patented, 5-step Data Evolution Process. It transforms and validates all IT data, enabling enterprises and managed service providers to make business decisions based upon complete and accurate data. Blazent is headquartered in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit or follow us on 2015 Blazent, Inc. All rights reserved. Blazent, the Blazent logo and Data Intelligence. Redefined are trademarks of Blazent, Inc. all other company and product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. # White Paper Optimizing the Financial and Operational Performance of IT 7