Let’s first address our title choice. While it can sometimes feel as though parts of your organization are at odds when it comes to digital innovation, we don’t mean to make an ‘enemy’ out of the IT department. We believe that it’s better to create a culture where adverse ideas don’t come up at all.
Digital innovation can be frustrating for your technical teams. So, to gain company-wide success, you must ensure any change management is as seamless as possible for everyone.
This means tackling pain points within your IT department, bridging communication gaps, and creating a stronger digital innovation process. Here’s how:
1. Establish a common language
Cross-team communication is often difficult or non-existent. Business and tech teams live in different worlds and therefore struggle to learn how to talk with one another. Unfortunately, when they do end up communicating, things that seem straightforward to one team come across as totally alien to the other.
To remedy this, it’s essential you get your business and tech teams on the same page. By establishing a common data language, you’ll ensure any digital innovation is painless.
In order to improve the cross department communication, here are a few tricks:
- Establish regular stand-up meetings where different team can communicate together
- Define data exchange formats, such as Excel spreadsheets, that all parties will fully understand
- At larger scale, you can embrace data models ‘with a twist’ - we’ll cover this point in the next step
2. Test actionable data models
If the scale of your data becomes too large, data models can be a great ‘common language’ between your teams. That said, translating the models into working pipelines can become a big burden on your development teams. More than this, it’s often a slow process that hinders innovation and collaboration.
Fortunately, there’s a way your organization can take data models one step further and improve your IT department’s stance on digital innovation.
We call it the data model bridge. Simply put, it accelerates the implementation of your data models by turning them into actionable ETL jobs. As your data models should be created with a standardized common language, it’s simply a case of clicking a button and executing a model instantly.
The benefits of the data bridge are:
- Improved transparency and auditability across your data models
- A standardized data language and fewer data silos
- Time savings for your IT department
If you choose to explore this approach, you can accelerate your data model implementation and reach digital innovation faster.
3. Accelerate your IT department’s productivity with automation
Digital innovation can be complex. For example, it can generate more tasks, such as time-consuming coding and manual data intervention, for your IT department.
So, to ease the burden, try to replace the tough jobs with automated solutions.
Data platforms, such as CloverDX, can automate workloads, create reusable templates for repeatable processes, and automatically profile and validate your data. In turn, this:
- Reduces your time to value
- Delivers insights to your business teams faster
- Boosts your IT department’s productivity
Bridge the communication gap
So, is your IT department a friend or foe of digital innovations? The answer is – it’s actually not helpful to think this way.
Ultimately, inefficient or time-consuming IT tasks frustrate your IT team. Rather than making an enemy out of your IT department, work towards resolutions that improve collaboration and innovation.
By accelerating your processes with automation, data models and innovative solutions (such as CloverDX’s data model bridge), you can find a common ground that’ll help you reach your innovation goals.
Want to find out more about our data bridge? Watch the webinar and discover how to turn data models into ETL jobs at the click of a button
