Innovation is the lifeblood of progress, yet inside many organisations, the quest to innovate faster often stalls behind mountains of data.
Terabytes turn to petabytes, overflowing storage and clouding decision-making. This is the data paradox – drowning in a sea of 1s and 0s while thirsting for meaningful answers. Dell’s most recent research reveals that:
- 69% of organisations struggle to extract value from their data assets.
- 51% lack data analytics solutions to ingest, process, and generate insights.
- 66% cannot track data movement.
- 68% of organisations fail to shift surplus data from the edge to core data centres.
It’s a frustrating place to be as the world transforms at warp speed. Nimble startups disrupt industries overnight. Breakthrough technologies like AI and 5G promise to revolutionise business. In this environment, innovating faster is mandatory. But how?
Strategic Steps to Innovation
- Seek Smart
Goal: Accelerate innovation with intelligent, efficient systems.
This means implementing AI-powered automation, robust analytics platforms, and industry-leading high-performance IT infrastructure with intelligent systems that are primarily self-managed. Human talent can focus on higher-value innovative initiatives instead of manual data tasks. With the rise of Generative AI, tremendous opportunities exist to create business-specific AI models that provide tailored, valuable insights.
- Be Flexible
Goal: Power any workload across edge, core, and cloud.
Flexibility is critical with data continuing its explosive growth from IoT, mobile, social media, and other sources. Organisations need the agility to consume data services on-demand, moving data pipelines across edge locations, core data centres, colocation facilities and the public and private cloud as needed.
- Build Resilience
Goal: Deliver comprehensive data protection everywhere.
Resilience translates into robust data security, privacy, and availability controls across all environments where data lives. Resilience delivers unified protection, encryption and access policies across edge, core data centre and multi-cloud deployments. Disaster recovery mechanisms must transcend infrastructure boundaries as well.
Modern data infrastructure (MDI)
Innovation requires data. Leaders must architect systems to collect, organise, analyse, and action data with speed, flexibility, and security. Only then can they consistently convert raw data into high-value insights, products, and experiences.
Consider autonomous vehicles. They ingest terabytes of visual data to navigate our world. Imagine the vehicle cannot interpret that video feed – it would be worthless. Data has no inherent value without the capacity to process it.
Constructing this processing capacity is the work of building a modern data infrastructure (MDI). MDI gives data momentum, transforming it from anchor to accelerator.
The first step is partnering with an infrastructure vendor like Dell Technologies. Constructing an innovation engine via MDI then involves six steps:
- Automation – MDI heavily utilises Dell’s artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions to simplify data operations with automated insights.
- Flexibility – MDI employs Dell Technologies to enable seamless movement of data workflows across edge locations, on-prem data centres, colocation facilities, and the public cloud.
- Resiliency – MDI implements Dell’s robust security tools for access controls, data encryption, backup, and disaster recovery to protect information across environments. Availability and integrity are paramount.
- Analytics Capability – MDI combines high-speed data pipelines, advanced Dell analytics platforms, and self-service BI tools to generate real-time insights from data.
- Scalability – Dell’s scale-out storage and computing architectures allow capacity to expand to match exponential data growth from IoT, customer experience tools, and other sources.
- Sustainability – MDI increasingly relies on Dell’s eco-efficient infrastructure designs that minimise power consumption across data centres and edge sites.
The Innovation Maturity Model
Dell’s research reveals a strong link between an organisation’s data infrastructure and capabilities and its ability to innovate successfully. Dell’s study established an Innovation Maturity Model across 5 groups – from Laggards to Leaders:
- Innovation Laggards: Little innovation investment or initiatives.
- Innovation Followers: Limited innovation planning and efforts.
- Innovation Evaluators: Stuck evaluating ideas, lack execution.
- Innovation Adapters: Large success innovating in some areas.
- Innovation Leaders: Innovation flows throughout the business.
Organisations were also grouped into 5 Data Maturity categories using the same data infrastructure assessment criteria, from Laggards to Leaders. The analysis found a strong correlation between higher data and innovation maturity.
Simply put, companies with data-driven capabilities excel at innovation. For example, 97% of Data Laggard organisations also ranked as Innovation Laggards or Followers. Conversely, 58% of Data Leader organisations were Innovation Leaders or Adapters.
Top Lessons from Data-Driven Innovators
- Collect, prepare, and curate data well. Clean, connected data is crucial.
- Use advanced automation to increase scale, control, and efficiency.
- Have a unified analytics platform to consolidate insights data.
- Upskill workforces with more data training and user-friendly analytics tools.
- Embed data usage and culture across the entire organisation to build innovation.
With the proper building blocks, progressive leaders can architect MDI as their organisation’s central nervous system – continuously sensing, analysing, and responding to opportunities across their environment.
As data flows faster and connections strengthen, leaders can reinvest efficiency gains from MDI into breakthroughs. The acceleration effect continues as progress drives more progress. Over time, a robust modern data infrastructurecan adapt as fast as the business environment.
