Contextualising sensitive data is key: Gaurav Shinh, Founder and CEO, SCIKIQ
Businesses must be prepared to transform in today’s fast-paced, constantly evolving digital world. Contextualising data is critical in helping organisations drive more innovation, create new revenue streams, stay lean, and enhance the bottom line, says Gaurav Shinh, Founder and CEO of SCIKIQ, in an interview with Express Computer
Some edited excerpts:
How can organisations derive more value from data?
Organisations are producing more data than ever before. Every business wants to unleash the value of this data, but most organisations need help to move beyond simply producing, collecting and storing massive amounts of information. The key to getting value out of your data is creating a modern data strategy that equips people across your organisation to respond quickly to market changes, improve efficiency, build new customer experiences, uncover growth opportunities and make high-quality decisions with speed.
When I talk to SCIKIQ customers, of whom probably many already have a hugely invested data infrastructure in place, be it on-cloud or on-prem, creating an effective data strategy that focuses on abstracting complexities from complex systems still needs to be evolved.
From being data-driven to becoming a data-intelligent organisation, how is SCIKIQ transforming customers?
While most C-Suite leaders resonate with the importance of transforming their business using data, the struggle to translate this vision into business value—consistently at scale stayed a challenge for a long time. Changing from being data-driven to becoming a data-intelligent organisation involves shifting the focus from just collecting and analysing data to using that data to gain deeper insights and make more informed decisions.
SCIKIQ helps transform the data fabric for customers by developing a comprehensive data strategy, including clear goals on data management, data governance policies, data quality standards, and guidelines for data usage. Emphasising data literacy in an organisation helps employees understand the importance of data and how it can be used to drive business decisions. Users across levels can identify patterns and predict outcomes with AI and custom rules. Training and support on building data literacy skills help the organisation drive quarter-on-quarter progression and growth.
How can you build a data-sensitive culture in organisations?
In the age of AI, the need for a data-sensitive culture has become paramount. AI relies heavily on data to function effectively and make accurate predictions, so organisations must have a strong data culture to ensure their data’s accuracy, completeness, and integrity. A data-sensitive culture emphasises the importance of collecting and maintaining high-quality data. Organisations can now gain insights that were previously hidden or difficult to identify. AI can automate many tasks that were once performed manually, leading to increased efficiency and productivity. Organisations that embrace a data-sensitive culture can gain a competitive advantage, drive better business outcomes and improve customer experience.
What major challenges do companies encounter as they integrate data from different systems?
Organisations often have different technology stacks depending on various factors such as their industry, business goals, budget, and IT infrastructure. A technology stack is a set of software and hardware technologies used to build and run applications and services within an organisation.
While the aspired, one view 360-degree dashboard is a dream for every business leader, integrating data from different systems needs thorough-bred planning and successful integration to lead to correct decision-making.
Some key issues are data quality, incompatible data formats, technical and code-related challenges, data access, security and privacy layers, and data from different systems that may need to be more consistent, complete, or accurate, making it difficult to integrate effectively.
Addressing data quality issues before integrating data from multiple sources is key to achieving the goal. SCIKIQ’s native data fabric platform has enabled organisations to incorporate data from existing technology stacks seamlessly. Our simple and intuitive no-code, the drag-and-drop user interface allows businesses to ingest and transform data for consumption by various stakeholders.
