by Mattia Gamberoni, Head of Enterprise, AWS Iberia
With organizations’ need for faster, data-driven decision making to adapt and meet customer needs, establishing a strategy to unleash your organizations data is even more pressing. Mattia Gamberoni, Head of Enterprise at AWS Iberia, discusses those organizations across Iberia that are leading the way and common challenges to look out for.
Designing and executing a robust data strategy is no longer optional for businesses. In my 15 years in enterprise technology, I have seen large companies experimenting with a diverse set of approaches to becoming a data-driven company.
Spanish customers of ours who are doing this well include A3Media, BBVA, Bankia, CEPSA, Santander OpenBank and Vueling. History is yet to show us which of the strategies is strongest, and of course, the needs of every business are different, but there are strong successes and learnings to draw from. Firstly, we know that while cloud technology plays a key role in this; organization, culture, talent and executive sponsorship are as important as tech in this process.
Many organizations across the Iberian Peninsula are reacting by building “competence centers,” creating new functions such as the “Chief Data Officer” or even creating new companies so that they can experiment and learn what it takes to be a “native” data-driven organization.
Talent will continue to be a scarce resource in an ever-changing environment. Even if hunting for talent is part of your strategy, it will become increasingly time consuming and unsustainable. Instead, creating a learning culture can help organizations develop their current workforce to navigate the evolution of technology and customer’s expectations.
Consolidating and democratizing data access is an essential part of the data-driven culture but on the other hand brings focus to security and access policies. We are well-positioned to help here as AWS services and our associated supply chain is vetted and accepted as secure enough for top secret workloads. It is also the largest partner ecosystem and we have a highly-skilled professional services unit to help.
Data is not only a tool for internal efficiency or great customer engagement; for many organizations it’s becoming also a potential source of revenue. We’ve been hearing this from customers in many different industries and for that reason, we built AWS Data Exchange, a service that makes it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third party data in the cloud.
Santander’s OpenBank is a great example of a business using AWS’s analytics services, big data capabilities, and machine learning services to make decision-making a science, rather than a guessing game. It has already had a major impact on the bank’s plans for long-term growth and expansion.
I believe that every business will need to become increasingly data-driven in future, it’s simply a matter of how fast and which approach is best suited. In his ebook “Becoming a Data-driven Organization” my colleague Joe Chung, AWS Enterprise Strategist, explores why it’s critical for organizations to harness the power of the data they have and shares some practical first steps to addressing your big data problem.
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