Although nowadays data is a critical business asset and data volume and typology continue to grow, most organizations still don’t have repeatable and consistent processes for converting data into insights that drive business value. The development of data and analytics pipelines is still a handcrafted process with minimal reuse that leads to a non-standard development environment that can’t keep pace with the demands of the data-driven business and an error-prone operational setup that is slow to respond to transformation requests.
Every digital transformation effort needs a data management strategy while investing in modern data platforms that enable real-time decision-making. This movement aims to improve an organization’s use of data through better data quality and data management practices, shorter cycle time and accelerated analytics. As data volumes grow and become more diverse and distributed, organizations need a platform for data engineers to automate and transform the essential data as needed.
The essentials of a DataOps platform
Data Operations or DataOps is an automated, process-oriented set of tools, and organizational structures to support the data-focused enterprise.
Based on Orchestration between data stakeholders, process, and technology and automation of data flows and lifecycles, DataOps allows organizations to successfully deliver effective data experiences, and shift their focus to data-driven business outcomes and cross-team alignment.
By applying principles of the Agile methodology, the DataOps approach values the continuous delivery of analytic insights with the primary goal of satisfying the customer. Agile development and DevOps add significant value to data analytics, but there is one more major component to DataOps.
Benefits of adopting a DataOps approach
There are many benefits of DataOps but the most important fall into the following five buckets:
Accelerate Time to Production – a major driver for DataOps is speed, by delivering new features and insights quickly and by reducing manual efforts.
Increase Quality and Predictability – Well-defined analytics pipelines enhance speed and robustness. Also, DevOps includes monitoring rolled-out changes to identify potential issues and helps to avoid disastrous scenarios by predicting them in advance using data analytics.
Improve Collaboration – blur the lines between departments and functions, encourage the exchange of knowledge, reduce conflicts, and eventually increase productivity.
Access and Ease of Use – centralize data knowledge –irrespective of data locations or data types – with ease-of-use providing instant findability and access
Ability to Scale – a DataOps practice can enable data access to more stakeholders within an organization, further increasing capacity for scale
Principles of DataOps
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Source: dataopsmanifesto.org
Why citizen developers need IT support and proper governance is a must in the DataOps process
A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others, using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT according to Gartner.
In other words, a citizen developer is someone who is not a developer by trade but is an empowered problem-solver from the various lines of business who has the drive and determination to engage in app development even though they lack coding skills.
One problem organizations face with citizen developers is that they may often have a limited field of knowledge on the problem they are trying to solve. Low-code apps produced by citizen developers can lead to poor performance and inconsistent code which is difficult to maintain, particularly when the original developer is no longer available.
How citizen developers think it’s done
Organizations must manage and comply with various regulatory and industry frameworks. Because the average employee in the trenches can’t be expected to know and address all of the regulatory and compliance controls necessary when they’re developing a solution to a productivity problem, citizen developers should ask for IT support and a proper governance plan is a must.
How it should be done (best practice delivery pipeline)
As Mark Driver, the research director at Gartner, says, the citizen developer platform vendors tend to overhype the compliance management capabilities of their software, and the citizen developers essentially ignore regulatory and compliance issues but if citizen development is done properly in partnership with the IT department, then that can work.
How can Encora help you?
Encora has an established practice with several years of experience in low code platforms, such as Power Apps and FintechOS, for rapid application development with proven results and enterprise customers. We invite you to challenge us to prove our expertise by delivering a Proof of Concept.
Resources:
- https://www.cio.com/article/242513/can-citizen-developers-bring-shadow-it-into-the-light.html
- https://www.gartner.com/en
