As with most complex business and process transitions, the more we engage and assimilate it, the more we must adjust, and course correct our expectations. This was my experience related to the topic of data management and the cloud.

Without too much thought, one could quickly surmise that having a solution centrally managed in the cloud might solve more data issues than it creates. But under closer examination, we see that an organization’s shift from on-prem to software-as-a-service can have the opposite effect.

Today, most lines of business can reach out to a service provider and start subscribing to the services and functionality they need with very little governance. For that single line of business (LOB) this might be great but the issue for most organizations is that each LOB needs to be connected to other business areas, so that business processes work across an entire enterprise. For example, when a person is hired, you want your HR onboarding process to issue them a phone, and a computer. The cost for those items needs to be accounted for in the finance and procurement systems. And the inventory device tracking numbers need to be attached to the new hire’s record in the employee database etc. These connections and data updates need to span and crisscross multiple business areas.

While it’s not ideal to have a line of business subscribing to the cloud services they need without governance, making a move to the cloud in a more holistic way with connected processes and data in mind is possible, and should be seen as an opportunity.  And as it turns out we have SAP partners who are helping customers break through their own data gridlock with a new cloud-based approach to data warehousing.

To learn more, I invite you to check out this recent article: Data Warehousing: A Critical Path to Customer Success in the Cloud by Jagdish Sahasrabudhe, CTO for the global partner organization at SAP. In the article Jagdish talks about rethinking the importance of data warehousing during a move to the cloud, and how the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution, a component of the SAP Business Technology Platform, can accelerate and simplify the process with its prebuilt models and templates, in-memory computing and its ability to automatically obtain and present the latest data.

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