The benefits of Autonomous Data for Business Executives looking for faster insight from their data
As we've seen in previous articles from this series, the Oracle Autonomous Database can help organisations drive outcomes from their digital transformation strategy and free up database administrators with from the drudgery of database management. What is less immediately obvious is the impact that autonomous data can have on business users within an organisation.
IDC predicted that in 2019, for the first time, spending on technology from line of business decision-makers would outstrip spending by the IT department[1]. Executives are now looking toward technology for the competitive edge it can provide across organisations, and help the IT team be seen not as a roadblock, but as a partner to help solve their business challenges.
Oracle's Autonomous Data is one such solution. With all units within a business looking to use data to make work better and more efficient, the Autonomous Database gives unprecedented access and data capabilities without raising the kind of security concerns that would often get IT involved.
Who benefits from the autonomous database?
The benefits of the Autonomous Data include providing easier, faster and better self-service insight, so it's easy to see how its core features would benefit the line of business:
- Security: The Autonomous Database encrypts data, monitors workloads, and keeps track of who is accessing the data, allowing business units to make use of the data without worrying about compliance or reputational risk from a compromised environment.
- Flexibility: The flexibility of the Autonomous Database allows business units to add or reduce capacity as their needs and projects fluctuate.
- Speed: The automation in Autonomous Databases eliminate the manual installation and analysis of data, providing decision-makers with critical insights, faster.
- Efficiency: Finally, the Autonomous Database leverages machine learning to ensure that it's always running efficiently, and according to the way that business decision-makers need it to run.
HR, finance, and marketing have different pain points when it comes to analysing data for faster insight and business reporting. However, all three benefit substantially from investment in the Autonomous Data.
HR needs to adhere to strict privacy restrictions and handle sensitive personal data. The Autonomous Database's self-securing features allow HR to maintain compliance without concern for breaches as a result of IT errors. Automation within the Autonomous Database also helps HR minimise the risk of poor quality data impacting on talent management, while the analytics capabilities of the Database allow for the HR department to rapidly collect and analyse data from any source, which translates to rapid decision-making around talent and employee engagement programs.
Finance has different requirements for the Autonomous Data. For finance, being able to collate key global data in a consistent format, and then build a central reporting source is hugely beneficial when reporting KPIs to management. Finance can also provide meaningful data and insights to other units within the business without needing to engage with IT first, speeding up its value to other decision-makers within the organisation quickly.
Marketing benefits from the Autonomous Data's ability to enable personalisation in marketing initiatives, through the collection and management of massive amounts of data from first and third parties within a centralised, unified environment. The ability for the Autonomous Data to rapidly provide analytics and reporting helps to track the performance of campaigns in real time, and the insights generated help marketing executives find innovation through actionable insights.
In each case, perhaps the biggest benefit is that through the Autonomous Data, executives from outside of IT can leverage technology without needing to first engage with the IT team. There are no roadblocks as an overloaded IT team needs to prioritise projects, and consequently, the entire organisation can be aligned behind a more nimble and agile approach to work.
That's not to say the IT team will need to relinquish their oversight on the database environment. Rather, the technology's automation can satisfy the immediate needs to the line of business decision-makers, while the IT team, elevated to a more consultative role, can engage more deeply with the other units within the organisation to find creative and innovative new solutions to address more strategic issues. In other words, not only does the Autonomous Database help ease the tension between IT teams and the units that want to leverage technology, it also helps foster a more collaborative environment across the entire organisation.
For business users in Finance, Marketing and HR, or analytics and data scientists who want to get hands on with Oracle Autonomous Data, register to attend an Oracle Cloud Insight Community Meetup in your city. Bring along a data set and watch how quickly new analysis and insight opportunities can be produced.
This article is the final story in a wider series on the autonomous database. Read on to find out how to get a competitive advantage through the autonomous database or the role autonomous technologies play in successful business transformation.