Establish Information Needs
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Gather information requirements.
- Identify data strategy goals.
- Categorize data requirements.
- Evaluate data access strategies for various business scenarios.
Gather Information Requirements
As NTO continues to refine its data strategy, the CDO discovers that they aren’t consistently gathering information requirements for projects, leading to data reliability concerns. Because if you haven’t identified the requirements, you can’t verify you’ve met them.
Identifying a user’s information needs is more than capturing the list of fields they want to see in the user interface. After all, data is merely the raw facts and figures, while information is the interpretation or the knowledge that comes from processing and understanding the data. It’s also important to identify what makes the data reliable.
In this unit, you examine how to capture information needs in detail, such as the need to gather and aggregate browsing history to identify potential customer preferences and when it’s permissible to share such insights.
Identify Goals
How business users view and interact with data depends on their specific goals. For example, you might want to show only previous purchases in your self-service portal for the majority of your customers. However, if you want to offer an elevated level of customer service to your top spenders, you could also show purchase recommendations. If your goal is to enable agents with AI, you need to decide when it’s acceptable to act on incomplete information versus prompting a user to gather additional details.
For the CDO, the goal is to ensure that NTO’s data strategy can speed up time-to-business-value. The data strategy ensures trustworthy data is used and enables monitoring of business-value realization. A good strategy allows for expanding capabilities while staying aligned with business objectives and priorities.
Describe Data Requirement Categories
NTO must carefully consider how data is captured, accessed, used, and retained to meet business needs effectively while ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and maintaining customer trust. Let’s review the data requirement categories.
Explore Data Access Strategies
After information needs are identified, the next step is to determine which data access mechanism can deliver the information in the most effective way. Let’s review the different types of data access strategies that NTO can follow to minimize data replication, keep data transformation costs low, and minimize data reliability and compliance risks.
Real-Time Data Federation
Within a Business Application
With a business application like Salesforce Connect, Salesforce admins can provide secure, real-time access to data from external sources to business users without replicating the data locally. This ensures that the information is always current.
Salesforce Connect | |
|---|---|
Pros:
| Cons:
|
Middleware
With middleware such as MuleSoft or Data Cloud Zero Copy, you can access, transform, and route data from multiple sources.
Middleware | |
|---|---|
Pros:
| Cons:
|
Data Replication
Near Real-Time
With near real-time data replication, such as MuleSoft, Salesforce message bus, or Data Cloud streaming ingestion, data is replicated and updated frequently, in near real-time.
Near Real-Time | |
|---|---|
Pros:
| Cons:
|
Batch
With batch data replication, such as Own Backup and Archiving, CRM-A Recipes, or Data Cloud Batch Data Streams, data is replicated in scheduled batches, typically on a daily or hourly basis.
Batch | |
|---|---|
Pros:
| Cons:
|
Systems of Reference
With systems of reference such as Data Cloud or Tableau serving as the data warehouse or analytics data lake, you have a centralized repository for data aggregated from various sources, often transformed and enriched for analysis.
Systems of Reference | |
|---|---|
Pros:
| Cons:
|
You’ve learned about key roles and activities in data management that guide solution planning and delivery processes. You explored how to gather comprehensive requirements to meet the information needs of your users. Next, learn about the factors that affect data quality so you can be sure that the information you gather is accurate and reliable.